It is official, confirmed by the Modern Language Association itself: This will be the worst year for academic job seekers in language and literature since the MLA started keeping records more than three decades ago.
I hope you’re not on the market this year. You may be good, but so are lots of other people. And the most important factor — luck — is beyond your control.
I have been coming to these conventions since the early 90s, back when my entering cohort of graduate students was assured by nearly everyone that jobs would be opening up towards the end of that decade.
And the situation did improve a little by the time I hit the market in 1998-99; the outlook was not desperate, just very bleak: At the time, there was, perhaps a 50 percent chance of a candidate ever joining the tenure-track after ten years or so of preparation.
It was like a golden age, the late-90s.
There are some variations based on field, but now I would guess the chances of any one candidate finding a tenure-track position are probably about 10 to 20 percent. (You can find some arguments about the probabilities in the Chronicle Forums.)
I been writing columns for The Chronicle on a variety of topics since 1998, but the ones that seem to attract the most readers have addressed the worsening situation of the academic job market. For example, “Graduate School in the Humanities: Just Don’t Go,” and “Just Don’t Go: Part II” generated a lot of mail for me last spring. Some of it was angry; more of it was of the “Why didn’t anyone tell me?” variety.
I received a letter today:
“Only two weeks ago, I sat down with my own adviser and had the ‘everyone is going to retire, so everything will be okay’ conversation. I felt a lot better after that, and was certain up until reading your article that academia would be a good fit for me. I’m already fine with moving around the country, with making a terrible wage, and putting in the time and misery to get a Ph.D. in the field — I just want a job afterwards. That possibility just seems less likely as time goes on. I certainly don’t hold any animosity towards my adviser, but I want to know where to go from here.”
I wish I could tell him. I hope that most graduate students in the humanities can now find some support at their university’s office of career services. (It used to seem shameful for Ph.D.’s to do that — what if your adviser heard about it?)
If there’s anything positive about the collapse of an already depressed job market, it may be that humanities graduates will stop thinking about their education as almost entirely focused on getting a tenure-track job, and they will be quicker to accept the necessity of building bridges outside of academe and moving on to more viable careers — and perhaps they will start to change the nature of graduate education and the academic labor system, both manifestly broken.
Anyway, over the next few days of the convention, I’ll be wandering around, attending panels, eavesdropping on strangers, eating at the Reading Terminal Market, poking around in the book exhibit (I’ll be at The Chronicle’s reception there, Tuesday at 3:30-5:00), observing the Delegate Assembly hearings, hoping to pick up some new ideas, and — for whatever it’s worth — gazing with empathy at the stressed-out job candidates.
Good luck, everyone. See you around.
12 Responses to The Worst MLA Ever
neoconned - December 30, 2009 at 11:31 am
people (at least those not in the trust fund sent) have to be realistic but not pessimistic and to be aware of that there may be no position for them at the end of the PhD. this does not mean not doing it, but working to cultivate secondary skills parallel to the PhD which may be marketable as a fail-safe: publishing and editing skills, technical writing, pedagogical skills. through my whole PhD i was convinced I would never get a position, to my surprise I landed a tt job after my post-doc, and the skills i cultivated in the meantime continue to earn me money on the side and pay dividends professionally. now as a prof i’ve seen to many snooty PhD students who simply don’t get that they should be using every opportunity to develop skills and professionalism. i could go on…
lackingcommonsense - December 30, 2009 at 3:33 pm
William, I was in that “retirement promise” cohort your writer mentioned. I was a trailing spouse off the tenure track for seven years. I was miserable, so I applied to law school. Unfortunately, I was geographically limited, and got offers through LSAC for waived application fees and scholarships from some very good schools I could not possibly attend. Then, I was the recipient of a great stroke of luck. My institution houses scholarly editions, and a friend of mine got me a job as an editor on one. This sort of job is not for everybody, but for nerds who want to research all day it is fabulous!
profray - December 30, 2009 at 4:08 pm
Dear TT-Job-Seekers, I was on the job market in 18th-century British in the 1977/78 AY with an Ivy-league Ph.D. and article in a top journal: two tenure-track jobs were available, both at great distances from my geographical comfort zone. I applied anyway and with great enthusiasm, shown in a tailored letter. One of those TT-job campuses invited me for the coveted campus visit: they had received 400 applicants. Until the campus visits, I had originally been their third-choice candidate, but got the job because the first two candidates (one from an IVY, and one from a public IVY) bombed their campus visits, which included teaching a class and presenting one’s research. Advice from a veteran: cultivate your social-interaction / conversational skills, table manners, and everyday manners. Learn to “talk” your paper and how to engage students in class discussions. Be patient, but also be realistic: given the economic crunch, I know of many schools that are replacing retired tenured profs with adjuncts, part-timers, etc. See the other Chronicle article about who is teaching students. PS My department hired 2 TTs (1 new position, 1 retirement) last year: one was a person who had spent several years as a Visiting Professor elsewhere; many of the other candidates also had visiting lines (370 candidates). We valued the teaching experience, and the research portfolio from his visiting line years. Good luck to all of you.
princeton67 - December 30, 2009 at 9:00 pm
In 1975, I got a PHD from Illinois; then, a public school teaching certificate. Taught in Georgia. Got SAT, Gifted, and AP add-on certification. Spent twenty-five years running a four-year Literature for Gifted high-schoolers. Taught everything from Austen to Zorba; constructed my own curriculum. Tenure after three years. Only pressure: kids get into college. Salary: $80k. Guaranteed pension: $52k. Plus COLA and health.No regrets.
lms347 - January 3, 2010 at 9:43 am
While I admire Prof. Pannapacker’s empathy– that and a buck might buy me a pack of gum. I am on the market (can you even call it that?) this year. There was ONE job for my field and I got through the first round, but no interview. Last year I was also on the market and received dossier requests from top 20 programs–no interview, no job. What does it mean when job candidates who are in the top of their field are jobless?? It means that the discipline is dying a (not-so) slow and painful death. Tenured profs might be breathing a sigh of relief and gazing with concerned empathy now, but if those tenured in the MLA don’t start doing something–demanding from their universities that their discipline is, indeed, worth funding, tenure is going to eventually be an empty and powerless status. There’s money out there– how do I know? My husband in Economics is also on the market this year. He applied to 80 schools–and that was limiting himself to schools that were more teaching oriented. We need more than empathy– we need action. Not just for poor forlorne job seekers, like myself, but for the good of the discipline.
jffoster - January 4, 2010 at 6:58 am
Quoth No 5, “but if those tenured in the MLA don’t start doing something–demanding from their universities that their discipline is, indeed, worth funding, tenure is going to eventually be an empty and powerless status.” So the MLA tenured members should “demand from their universities”…? I can just imagine their universities quaking in their boots thinking “Oh no, not that!!: And I can imagine pigs flying.
lms347 - January 4, 2010 at 10:28 am
Look- the fact of the matter is that there are departments and disciplines that get funding to hire and to pay even their adjuncts well. It’s because humanities (especially English) PhDs are willing to work for peanuts that we have a glut of non-tenure track adjunct positions. People are willing to muddle along taking whatever scraps are handed to them all for some sort of mis-placed “love” of what they do. As though that’s a reason not to be reasonably compensated. But the fact of the matter is that humanities departments are often the workhorses of Universities– we teach huge numbers of classes. If there’s no workforce willing to sell their souls to teach for a measly $2000 a class (no benefits, of course), things would have to change. If humanities PhDs would be willing to say, “Screw this. I can make more money and be just as fulfilled outside of academe” the way that some social sciences or science PhDs are willing and able to do, then maybe things would be a bit different. It is in other departments. In the econ department at my university (and it’s an econ department in LAS) adjuncts make at least $5-7000 a class, but there’s only a handful of adjuncts, because for some reason those students seem to understand that they’re worth more than that. And if the already-tenured ranks of profs don’t start doing something–organizing or unionizing or something–now, there’s not going to be enough of them left in 5-10 years to have any power what-so-ever. I never said it would be easy.
lee77 - January 4, 2010 at 1:01 pm
Unfortunately, lms347′s comment reminded me of the old saw: Those who can, do; those who can’t, teach.
jffoster - January 4, 2010 at 4:09 pm
No 7 says: “If humanities PhDs would be willing to say, “Screw this. I can make more money and be just as fulfilled outside of academe” the way that some social sciences or science PhDs are willing and able to do,…”Now that’s the major threat. Why, industry and business would snap them up in a minute.
awegweiser1 - January 4, 2010 at 7:55 pm
lee77 did not complete “the old”saw”. It goes:”Those who can’t do, teach; those who can’t teach, administer; those who can’t administer, administer anyway.”
martyncph1974 - January 5, 2010 at 3:55 am
The U.S. academic job market is certainly depressed/depressing, but one lesson of this might be that more U.S.-trained scholars should take the plunge into the global academic job market. In fall 2008, my own European university–one of the top 100 in the world, according to the _THE_ rankings (for what that’s worth!)–advertised an assistant professorship in American literature and culture. The position was advertised internationally, including the _THE_ (paper edition and website; it may also have been in _The Chronicle_, tho I confess I can’t recall right now). Yet we received only 17 or 18 applications. Though we were pleased to appoint a U.S.-trained Americanist with an excellent CV who had previously been working in Asia, the feeble number of applications was disappointing–and surprising. I won’t pretend that the European academic job market is thriving–indeed, the crisis in American studies in Britain mirrors the tribulations of American studies at U.S. universities like MSU–but at a time when the domestic job market is so tough, more U.S.-based scholars, especially recent graduates, might look more closely at opportunities abroad.
martyncph1974 - January 5, 2010 at 8:38 am
(PS–my original version of the above comment got lost in cyberspace, so in the hasty rewrite I forgot to add that among those 17 or 18 applications, only about 4 or 5 came from U.S.-trained or -based Americanists.)