Positive Liberty

Perspectives is the news magazine of the American Historical Association. It has the thankless task of matching the population of graduate students with the much smaller pool of available jobs. This month’s issue featured two articles of note for the would-be historian.

First came the 2004 job market report. Its overwhelming pessimism is more evidence that my failure to find a job this cycle wasn’t entirely my fault:

“Only one third of the people who received PhDs from history departments over the past 15 years found jobs in the departments and organizations listed in the latest edition of the [AHA] Directory.” The remainder had to seek employment elsewhere.

“This survey also found that the pool of applicants is much larger than previously suspected. One out of every three faculty hired by listing departments in the United States received their PhDs either in another discipline or from a university located in another country.”

“Jobs advertised in Perspectives fell 1.8 percent from the year before, from 870 to 854, even as the number of new PhDs reported to the Directory rose 6.5 percent… It has now been 12 years since we could report there were more new jobs than PhDs.”

“As bad as those trends might appear, they actually understate the problems for new PhDs. Many of the openings advertised are only for senior members of the profession and short-term post-doctoral fellowships (which were counted for this survey only if they paid more than $25,000 per year). [Some fellowships do pay less.] …This year… we found that the number of jobs advertised to junior scholars declined 6.2 percent.”

“Most worrisome are the declines in fields with the most PhDs–North American and European history. Job openings in European history fell 18.5 percent from the year before, to 150 openings–the lowest level since the 1997-1988 academic year.”

“[T]he pace of retirements from history departments eased a bit… For the third year in a row, history PhD programs are projecting a 4 percent increase in the number of new graduate students admitted to their programs.”

I know, I know, I usually hate it when people shirk personal responsibility for their failures. I like to tell myself that if I fail–ever, on anything–then I should look first to myself.

“But are you really to blame?” you might ask. I’m not sure, but at the very worst it’s a useful delusion. No other approach to failure has ever led to self-improvement.

The job numbers are obviously discouraging, but they reveal an important fact: Some students are still getting jobs all the same. To the extent that I am not one of them, it’s clear that I need to work harder. What else can I possibly conclude? What else, that is, that will do me any good in the future? Blaming my failure on the market isn’t going to help me the next time around. Working harder just might.

But were anyone to ask me about graduate school, I would confidently advise them to run away as fast as possible. If they truly love history, then they may read just the same books at home. They can even blog about them with Caleb and I, with Timothy Burke, and with the good folks at Cliopatria. Given enough discipline and critical thinking, they can acquire many of the mental habits and research skills that historians usually have. History is a fine intellectual pursuit, and I do wish that more people would take it up as amateurs. If nothing else, it would certainly make more careers for academic historians.

Back on the subject of finding a job, the current issue of Perspectives also profiles a web site for people in exactly my position: Frustrated students near the end of their graduate studies who might be interested in non-academic jobs. The site is called Beyond Academe, and I recommend it to the aspiring historians who read this site. If you are like me, the following quotes will leap out at you immediately. They come from an interview with Alexandra Lord and Julie Taddeo, the site’s founders:

The most damaging misconception is “this odd belief that history PhDs who work outside of the academy, whether as public historians, journalists, policy analysts, or whatever, are ‘failures,’” a belief that has “no basis whatsoever,” Lord said.

The belief comes, I think, from the lack of institutional interest in nonacademic jobs during the late phase of a historian’s graduate training. Yet if fully 2/3 of graduate students go on to nonacademic jobs, then the academy is seriously misplacing its priorities. Here is just one example:

Another pervasive myth is that history PhDs in nonacademic careers are anti-intellectuals who “must not have really loved history, teaching, or research if they left the field,” said Lord.

Bingo. It’s not usually an explicit prejudice in academia, but it’s certainly there beneath the surface. It’s also what annoys conservatives about the academy: Universities are the pinnacle of thought, and everything else is, well, an afterthought.

There are also some practical obstacles to making the transition to a nonacademic job, such as knowing where to start looking for one. Taddeo said, “as graduate students we tend to isolate ourselves–our only contacts are with each other and we tend to idolize our advisers and fear letting them down.” Those seeking nonacademic positions have to learn what Taddeo said she learned to do: “aggressively network, approach complete strangers, and … ask for help.”

…If historians regard themselves as narrow specialists in only one topic, and think that their graduate education provided no “real” skills, then “you cripple yourself on the job market,” said Lord.

Beyond Academe provides abundant help on repositioning oneself as a nonacademic, and I plan to work at it aggressively in the coming year. Now, I won’t give up on finding an academic career, of course. Coming from a good school, my chances at the academic lottery are probably better than average. Yet if I am going to have a non-academic career, it would be far better to plan it with open eyes than to stumble into it thoughtlessly.

Forgive me for repeating myself, but if only one third of all PhDs in history ever end up working as academic historians, and if two thirds end up elsewhere, shouldn’t the academy focus more–rather than less–on securing jobs for the majority? It may be easier to help place students in teaching positions, but it can’t be that hard to place them elsewhere: Two nonacademics with a website are already doing more in their spare time than many entire departments.

We would laugh if a doctoral program in a technical field treated careers this way, and yet the humanities have shut themselves off in a manner that would be unthinkable for any other field with similar career and graduation statistics. We sometimes wonder why so many people think of academics as isolated and impractical, yet it’s a message we’ve practically been screaming at the tops of our lungs. Changing the tone even a little bit would do more than just help students find good careers; it would also do wonders for our public image.

Trackback URI |