From reading other posts, I gather that some disciplines are having OK years, some are having down years, and some are experiencing total meltdowns. It seems to be mostly MLA fields whose job markets have collapsed, like my own. This isn't a small discipline experiencing a bad fluctuation; it's a major field where the number of tenure-track jobs is a fraction of what it was last year, let alone two or three years ago.
There was some thought that jobs would show up at a more measured pace this year, but I'm not seeing it so far. The MLA job list has been open for 8 weeks, which is when something like 90% of tenure-track positions have shown up in past years. The list this year started off very low, and since then it has added tenure-track jobs at a much slower pace than in previous years, at least in my field.
The first applications deadlines for positions in MLA fields have now passed. Here's my guess: search committees are not seeing any more applications than normal. The 100 people who fit the job description are still applying for all the jobs they fit, whether that's 20 jobs or 5. If there's only 5 Renaissance jobs, you can't send out extra applications to 20th century American positions to make up the difference. For those of you who are on SCs with deadlines that have passed, what are you seeing? Is my hunch wrong?
There's a chance that the MLA conference will be a ghost town this year, but that won't be clear until December, when most short-listed candidates are contacted. Maybe attendance will be 50% of normal, and the MLA leadership will decide that they've weathered the storm; even if there are only 10 positions in a given field, that's still 100-150 interview slots that need to be filled. On the other hand, I've noticed that very few ads in my field this year are specifying that initial interviews will be held at MLA. If search committees stay home, so do job applicants.
Michael Berube expresses surprise in a blog post (
http://crookedtimber.org/2009/11/04/applications/) about the possibility of job postings descending to what he calls Depression-era levels, but that's probably more or less accurate. The absolute number of jobs on the list is down, but the type of posting that has held its own in my discipline's section are the oddball ads posted to every humanities forum in the universe (you know, "Director of the King Fahd Center for the Humanities in Medina, Saudi Arabia; must have own source of funding," and things like that). What has collapsed instead is the tenure track. Even if it's not truly Depression-era, then it certainly makes for a depressing era to be on the job market.
