The End of Business as Usual

In a recent post, Tenured Radical discusses an essay by Sterling Fluharty at his blog, PhDinHistory. The two posts make for a worthwhile exchange between two savvy commentators on the academic job market.

The gist of it has to do with how we — academics as a whole — can rethink our approach to the job market given the apparently permanent (and worsening) fiscal problems facing higher education. Fluharty, especially, takes up the question of academic elitism in the creation of the current and future market for history professors, an issue that interests me broadly in terms of faculty aspirations, institutional types, and the way graduate students are prepared for the market.

Some commentators foretell the doom of the traditional university, and the kind of liberal-arts education that goes with it, with the possible exception of the richest and most elite institutions. I am not so sure about that prophecy, but it is a real question whether disciplines that aren’t obviously utilitarian (history, English, etc.) will be able to survive in a recognizable form outside of elite institutions. Even if that dire question turns out to be too alarmist, it is absolutely clear that business as usual in the academic job market in such fields is not sustainable.

So: How can we rethink the academic market to accommodate financial and demographic realities we cannot control? And how can we resist the continuing decline of the tenure-track professoriate in areas we can control?