From the issue dated April 12, 2002
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A Market Solution to the Oversupply of HistoriansBy ROBERT E. WRIGHTI am a 33-year-old historian with three monographs (published by Cambridge University Press, Greenwood, and Rowman & Littlefield), a forthcoming six-volume edited series, and scores of book chapters, refereed articles, book reviews, paid speaking appearances, and the like to my credit. Moreover, with an M.A. in intellectual history and a Ph.D. in economic history, I have taught a variety of courses in history, economics, and evolutionary psychology at three research universities, a state college, and two private colleges. Alas, I remain a member of the academic underclass. At present, I happen to be a relatively well-paid freeway flyer, which is why I have the time to write this essay. I propose to explain why I and so many scholars have been unable to get tenure-track positions in history, by referring to a few common-sense microeconomic concepts. While the average salary for new tenure-track assistant professors in history, around $40,000 per year, is modest given the demanding nature of the job and the many years of training it requires, the salary is, in fact, higher than necessary to attract qualified applicants. We know that is the case because it is quite common for an advertisement of a single tenure-track job opening to attract several hundred serious applicants. With rare exceptions, every tenure-track offer made in history is accepted. Not all disciplines enjoy access to such a large reserve army of labor. For the last three years, I have had the privilege of teaching economics and of seeing the job market for economics professors firsthand. Some economics departments interview scores of candidates and make as many as a dozen offers before receiving one acceptance. Most job seekers in economics must choose among several serious offers. The history job market, on the other hand, is like a lottery. Many people enter graduate school in history with unrealistic expectations. Prospective students see the prize of a job with tenure -- a comfortable salary, reasonable working conditions, lifetime employment -- but graduate programs do not always make it clear that the odds of drawing a winning ticket are slim. Compounding the problem is the fact that the lottery is fixed; not all players holding a ticket -- a Ph.D. -- have an equal chance to win. The reason is clear. When making tenure-track hires, history departments engage in what economists call nonprice rationing and what educated laypeople might call discrimination. To reduce the large group of applicants to a manageable number, the members of history-department search committees reject applications for the slightest cause. Maybe a particular department needs another female member. Toss out all the applications from men, and the chore looks much easier. If the pile is still too big, it is easy enough to dismiss the applications from historians who specialize in diplomatic, economic, military, political, religious, or anything other than cultural, gender, labor, or social history. Then the finer-toothed comb appears: This candidate's cover letter reads too much like a form letter; that candidate did not graduate from a top-tier school; another candidate refused to send six official transcripts from her elementary school and notarized copies of her birth certificate. The actual winnowing process is probably rarely that explicit, but whether it is consciously done or not, the effect is the same. Given the state of the job market, it is convenient and possible to indulge personal preferences. Interestingly, departments readily admit the essentially discriminatory nature of their hiring decisions. Almost all take pains to point out that they received applications from a large number of qualified applicants. That, of course, raises the question, "How did you make your decision?" Many rejection letters, therefore, clearly state that the search-committee members did not see a good fit in their department for the rejected candidate. What exactly does "fit" mean? Apparently, it means that the object of the hiring decision was to increase the job satisfaction of the current faculty members. Indeed, that is the most rational choice for department members to make when confronted with a large number of qualified applicants. Departments in all disciplines try to engage in the same process, but they can do so only to the extent that they have a glut of serious candidates. Economics departments currently have precious little opportunity to indulge themselves, but history departments have ample room to maneuver. I know of one candidate for a history job who was rejected because her surname was the same as that of a member of the department, and a professor on the search committee thought she would therefore not be a good fit. Unfortunately, the aggregate effect of history departments' decision-making processes is devastating the profession by greatly reducing the diversity of its teachers. Aspiring professors from lower-tier schools are shunted into low-paying adjunct jobs or urged to leave teaching altogether. In fact, the discipline is beginning to resemble an aristocracy where what matters is pedigree, not productivity. If you come from the right university, write about the right topics in the right way, and please the right people, you win the lottery. If not, you receive a letter stating that you do not fit. As older faculty members retire and are replaced by those who fit, the diversity and ultimately the quality of historical discourse and pedagogy is sinking. A significant number of historians became so enraged with the situation a few years ago that they created their own professional organization, the Historical Society. Others simply left the field. Moreover, the fit criterion makes academic freedom a cruel joke for scholars who are not on the tenure track. Where fit is the key to getting a permanent job, one must be careful of what one says and writes. Attempts to fit are distorting scholarship and teaching. Woe to the job candidate bold enough to suggest in an interview that financiers were not uniformly pernicious, or that there is more to business history than the concept of class struggle. The academic freedom of the professoriate, in short, is purchased at the cost of the academic freedom of the untenured. The solution is clear. The salaries for new assistant professors should be lowered until the number of qualified job applicants (not the number of new Ph.D.'s, which is just a subset of that group) and the number of job openings become more equal. That market-oriented approach has several major advantages. Educational quality would improve, for two reasons: Departments could afford more tenure-track historians, which would reduce institutions' dependence on adjuncts; and search committees could no longer reject qualified applicants for frivolous reasons. New Ph.D.'s would have more freedom to speak their minds, because they would be more in demand -- thus increasing the profession's diversity. Finally, fewer new students would enter graduate programs in history if they knew their future earnings would be low, thus preventing an overabundance of history professors in the future. A broader solution is to make the market for higher education more competitive. Currently, the budgets of most academic institutions, and the salaries of most professors, are only loosely tied to classroom performance. At first glance, any change seems unlikely. Adam Smith, after all, made the same point more than 200 years ago, when he argued that "the endowments of schools and colleges have necessarily diminished more or less the necessity of application in the teachers. Their subsistence, so far as it arises from their salaries, is evidently derived from a fund altogether independent of their success and reputation in their particular professions." The explosion of administrative expenses that occurred in the last decades of the 20th century has exacerbated the situation. Rapid advances in communication technology, however, may bring intense competitive pressures to bear against traditional brick-and-mortar institutions. How the struggle will end is anyone's guess, but it does not seem prudent to cultivate aristocracy on the eve of potential revolution. Historians, of all people, should know that. Robert E. Wright is a lecturer in economics at the University of Virginia. His most recent book is The Wealth of Nations Rediscovered: Integration and Expansion in American Financial Markets, 1780-1850 (Cambridge University Press, 2002). http://chronicle.com Section: The Chronicle Review Page: B20
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Copyright © 2002 by The Chronicle of Higher Education