Critical Distance III: The Dismal Science
Jason Kuznicki on Jul 24th 2006
This is the third in my series of posts reconsidering various aspects of academic history. The first dealt with theory; the second looked at historiography. This one is about the so-called job market.
Some of you may be asking yourselves — with apologies to Tim Burke, who got it almost right –
Should I go to graduate school for history?
My short answer: No.
My long answer: No, and here’s why…
Few inside the academy will tell you this, and you may not be inclined to listen when they do, but the chances are pretty strong that you will not find an academic job when you graduate. Indeed, it is estimated that only one-third of PhD recipients from the last fifteen years found permanent work in the academy.
If you are a purposeful, direct, take-charge kind of person (like I am), then you will probably be frustrated by this outcome. (Like I am.)
When, on average, your nine years of graduate school (!) are over, you will find yourself in an awkward scramble for work that will in all probability not end where you wanted it to. And when you contemplate a job outside the academy, you will soon discover that academics fall into two camps: The best of your soon-to-be-former academic colleagues will sincerely try to help you in finding work outside the academy. Yet the academy is famously isolated. So are you; so are they. These well-wishers will be of relatively little practical help. Meanwhile, the worst of your soon-to-be former colleagues will be actively embarrassed by your plight, and they will worry that offering you any help might dilute the professionalism of the academy itself.
Got to have those priorities, you know.
Certain biases are at work here too, and it’s best that you look them squarely in the eye: If you do not go to an elite school for your degree, it is even more unlikely that you will find a tenure-track job. (Remember, if you do go to an elite school, it is merely improbable. It is not, of course, impossible.)
The elitism of the elite schools is wrong, it’s counterproductive, and it needs to stop. I went to both an elite and a non-elite institution for different parts of my degree, so I speak from experience: Had I been kept in systematic ignorance about which one was purportedly the “better” institution, I don’t think I could ever have figured it out.
Indeed, some of the most breathtakingly intelligent people I have ever encountered taught at a school that is usually written off as a football factory. I’ve seen up close the snobbery directed at them merely for teaching there, and it is appalling. (I’ve also seen snobbery directed at the elite school I attended. For some, it just wasn’t elite enough.)
It makes me wonder, with fine people like these at a so-called second-rate school, might community colleges have their share of first-rate minds as well? Who knows. And maybe — just maybe — there are one or two smart people outside of academics, too.
But this is just one of the many ways in which the academic world is substantially divorced from reality. Another is adjuncting.
As a prospective graduate student, but a relatively wise one who is already thinking ahead to his real career prospects, you may be tempted by the following train of thought: “Well, I might not find a tenure-track job my first few times on the market, but that’s okay. I can take an adjuncting post for a few years and get by until I do.”
For starters, you clearly know nothing of the Invisible Adjunct. To hear her tell it, adjuncting tends to be a lot like grad school, but with no health insurance and no particular reward at the end. Oh, and less status. She is right, and you should listen to her.
Sometimes adjuncts must do a truly ridiculous amount of teaching. My own brush with adjuncthood was even crueler: Recently I was offered an adjunct position with a prestigious university. It was a place where I’d happily take a visiting professorship — and where I’d turn handsprings to get a tenure-track job. The terms were simple: Teach two classes. Earn a four-figure salary. No benefits, natch. Courses met during business hours, so virtually all outside jobs that might interest me are out of the question.
Our household was forced to ask, in all seriousness, whether I could afford to take the job — whether, in other words, I could pay what it would on balance cost to keep chasing the academic dream.
I declined the post, and I received the following note in reply: “I’m sorry for the department’s sake, but — speaking personally rather than institutionally — I think you’re wise.”
I still have some pride, I guess, and so do they. Good for them.
Although the total number of new PhDs declined last academic year, the 2004-2005 hiring cycle was the first in fifteen years where the supply of academic jobs was greater than the number of graduates who earned their degrees in that year alone. This translates to a huge backlog of people with PhDs who are looking for academic work.
And while this was a relatively “good” year to find an academic job, here are a few caveats, courtesy of Perspectives magazine, the field’s business journal:
Four trends suggest this could just be a transitory moment for the academic job market. Over the past five years, the number of graduate students entering history PhD programs has been rising, while the proportion of faculty approaching retirement has been falling. And looking forward, the U.S. Department of Education anticipates that the recent growth in the number of new undergraduate students at American colleges and universities will slow down over the coming decade—about the time it would typically take someone just starting a history PhD to finish.
You read that right — it takes about a decade before you have to face the cold, hard reality that 1) you don’t have a job in the field that you trained for 2) all your non-academic friends have been leading productive lives in the meantime and 3) you’re a decade behind on saving for retirement, starting a family, and living a normal life.
This is the real reason why you should not go to graduate school in history: Your twenties are the most important decade of your life when it comes to defining your career. No matter how long you live, people will always ask about these formative years. Replying that you spent them getting a PhD in history marks you as uniquely unqualified for anything in particular. You will forever be more “interesting” than you are “employable.”
Whether you like it or not, many employers in the real world will look at you and fail entirely to see a brilliant and dedicated researcher. No, the real world never really believed such things existed. Instead, its inhabitants will see you as a scruffy, eccentric, latté-swilling Laputian. By the time you’ve finished graduate school, and despite your best efforts, you may even be a scruffy, eccentric, latté-swilling Laputian, in which case you can forget about any career except being a professor. And pouring lattés, of course.
Tim Burke wrote the following about grad students who quit before they get their PhDs. It is also true of those who don’t find academic work afterward:
you will still have to deal with the nagging fear that somehow, some way, you just weren’t good enough, that you couldn’t cut the mustard. That fear will almost certainly be wrong… But academia is a total culture. It changes your standards for what is good and what is bad, what is smart and what is dumb.
Independently evaluating academic life from within its confines is a near-impossibility.
Past your second year of study, you will no longer know how to. I don’t think you can again until you have finished and come out the other side with a Ph.D. I feel like I’ve got perspective again now, but it takes time and distance–and the clarity that comes from making it all the way through. If you quit in between, even when it is right and proper that you do so, even when you should feel triumphantly scornful of all academia has to offer you personally, your own yardsticks for achievement will have been so altered that you will spend years exorcising all the little spectres of doubt that follow you away from the ivy walls.
He’s right. I don’t know how to evaluate success or failure anymore. I can write all I like about the crushing arbitrariness of the job market. I’m conversant in economics, so I even know the method to the madness: State subsidies for higher education tend to produce an oversupply of educated people. A state can hardly fail to misallocate resources, and, in all likelihood, we have too many universities, too many graduates, and too many PhDs in the fields the politicians think are important — like history. Sometimes I can tell myself that I just happen to be caught in the middle of all this.
That’s when I’m feeling chipper. Other times, I feel differently: I take enormous pride in my accomplishments — academic snobbery was all too easy for me, back when I played that game — but my pride comes with a counterweight, too: In failure, I am severe with myself in a way that astonishes everyone who knows me. Whether the market is or is not at equilibrium, I am invariably to blame. It is my fault, my fault for failing, my fault for not getting a job, my fault for not making my alma maters proud. I wonder if, when I applied for jobs, anyone sniffed at my years with that so-called second-tier school and tossed my application aside. I wonder if the elite school I also attended is going to slip in the ranks because of my failure. My failure. Mine.
Sound like fun? Then try grad school. You’ll have a blast. And who knows, you might not even fail.
Filed in The Bookshelf
What would you recommend to, say, a medievalist who is looking to taking his comps in another couple of months and is pretty much already past the point of no return?
The flip side of the coin
Jason Kuznicki has what might be fairly pitched as the counterpoint to Michelle Dion’s posts with advice to prospective graduate students—that is, if somehow you came away with the impression that Michelle’s advice was rosy (which, um, it wasn’…
If you’re already in graduate school, I do think it’s best to stay with it. At least if you’re enjoying it. I know I thoroughly enjoyed the experience, and I do feel like I grew from it intellectually, too. It’s convincing others that’s the hard part.
Oh, the last three years have been some of the most enjoyable of my life. And having a wife who is not an academic has allowed me to keep enough perspective to know that there’s no shame in teaching at a (private) high school or community college. The next three years are going to be very, very nerve-wracking, though.
“It makes me wonder, with fine people like these at a so-called second-rate school, might community colleges have their share of first-rate minds as well?”
God I hope so!
:)
I think it also depends on what you get your Ph.D. in. Of course you can work outside of the academy with almost any Ph.D. But with a history or philosophy degree, your outside opportunities are going to be fewer than say if you got a Ph.D. in business.
There are plenty of law jobs. But when one of those full-time legal positions open, even in a community college, there may be between 50-100 applications of attorneys trying to get out of the practice of law.
Jon –
I hope you realized that I was speaking to a certain mindset, and that I was doing so with as much sarcasm as possible.
Even if you weren’t, I wouldn’t be offended. I’m practically unoffendable.
[...] I read Positive Liberty and Adventures in Ethics in Science, both of which have been focusing on careers in academics of late. Here’s my question to readers who are presently in doctoral programs, or who have completed them. Is it worth it? [...]
I’m a grad-school dropout in English. You just reminded me of a big aspect of why I left. But I have to disagree with this:
“A state can hardly fail to misallocate resources, and, in all likelihood, we have too many universities, too many graduates, and too many PhDs in the fields the politicians think are important — like history.”
Politicians think history is important? What’s your evidence for this? Yeah, we do seem to have too many humanities PhD’s for the number of jobs available, but I have a hard time seeing how politicians’ love for the humanities is what’s at fault here.
And I think the idea that we have too many universities or university graduates is wrong. Surely you, as an academic, can get that participating in higher education is a worthwhile end in itself, that its value isn’t just in job training. I wish we had a much better-educated society than we do now.
Politicians think history is important? What’s your evidence for this?
I have to second that. My guess is we have so many humanities majors because we’ve got a ton of programs and the material is more entertaining to the median college-aged kid than, say, mathematics or engineering. I think it has a lot to do with people’s consumption value for education. College is a lot of fun, and it’s easy to forget that at the end of it all you’re supposed to be getting gainful employment.
I actually think you’re probably both right, and that I erred in the line about government and oversupply.
My reasoning had been as follows: Do politicians not want someone to write about them? And don’t they think it’s important to inculcate civic values, and therefore a sense of history in its most conventional sense? I think there’s still some truth to this, but the consumption value of education in the liberal arts is probably a lot more of a factor.
Yeah, I like AMW’s point about the consumption value. That’s certainly what got me to start grad school in English.
Do politicians think it’s important to inculcate civic values? I think you’re being insufficiently cynical here, at least concerning the average politician. Most politicians spend their days doing things that contradict “civic values” as I understand them: raising funds for reelection and doing favors for the people who gave them money; and reducing complex questions of morality and policy to the simplest, most polarizing sound bites they can think of. Maybe in some abstract way, politicians want to inculcate civic values, but most of their behavior shows where they really stand.
Do politicians want people to write about them? Sure, but you don’t need a graduate degree to be a journalist or a ghostwriter.
Yeah, you are super-tough on yourself. I guess it is your fault in the sense that you did make the choice to study 17th century French history instead of something more marketable–European history is not as much in demand these days as compared to say Latin American and even then the market would be tight. But you did get away with getting paid for doing it for that many years, so that’s a big accomplishment–the people I feel for are the ones that are actually paying for their grad degrees because of lack of funding and then can’t find jobs and just have all that debt to worry about.
But then the fact that you could pull together a paper on how Chinese and Jesuit encounters relates to UFO encounters just blows my mind so I know you’re not one of these academic one-trick ponies. I don’t know how common post-docs or additional Phd work is after you’ve already gotten your degree is, but I would think you could use your impressive knowledge of technology and languages and philosophy to re-market yourself into something very marketable in academia or industry even though it doesn’t relate to your dissertation work. My career role model who’s a director for user experience at Intel and is extremely famous within the human-computer interaction community actually has a PhD in Native American ethno-history.
Hi Jason. I haven’t stopped by in a while, but I had hoped that you might be one of the lottery winners, despite the odds. Academia is coming full circle, returning to the times when one couldn’t afford to support a family on a teacher’s salary, and when people with inherited money constituted a significant percentage of the faculty. We may see an increase in the “independent scholar” category as well - people who have a day job and write/research at night. I know a few of these. In the old days, clergy used to be the main independent scholars - half of local histories seem to have been written by the parish priest of the locale.
Jason,
I just came across your blog. I’ve been where you are at so I thought I would share some thoughts with you. To begin with, your terminology needs to be adjusted. Being an historian is in your mind. If you think of yourself as an historian and pursue and publish you will be an historian. Professional historians are like any other professionals, they make a living by selling books and articles on history. Those in academia are not professional historians (most anyway). Regardless of how they define themselves, they get paid to teach. They publish for advancement but are paid to teach. These I would call academic historians. Then there are those who work outside academia (government, business, museums, libraries, etc.) and publish. These are non-academic historians. All are historians if they research, write and publish history. There you have it, professional historians, academic historians, and non-academic historians.
Critical Distance I
Let’s talk about theory. About the Bruce Holsinger quote, you must keep in mind the audience for whom one is writing. Holsinger was not writing for the public. He was writing for those who will judge his ‘intellectual’ ability, his colleagues. I once sat in on a department discussion in which the discussion was whether or not to keep a particular historian. He was a wonderful teacher. He had his PhD, and had published a number of books. However, some historians complained he was just not intellectual enough. I have no idea how that turned out as I was a grad-student and wasn’t supposed to be there in the first place.
I do know that academia does not look favorably on historians who write history that sells. I think the reasoning is that if the history is popular then it must have been dumbed down, i.e., not very intellectual. Remember, we are dealing with a very closed society I like to call the Priesthood. If one wants to advance in academia, one writes for the Priesthood not the public. It is the Priesthood, which determines your success or failure in academia. I am very glad I never got an academic position because I would not have worked very well in this type of environment.
“Historians should read much less theory and many more primary sources.”
Perhaps. However, I think you have to do both. Whether you like it or not you have chosen the career path of an intellectual. As such, you must be able to grapple successfully with theories. You need to know the prevailing theories and be able to intelligibly support them or refute them. You should be able to say what Foucault is writing about and why you think he is right or wrong. Same thing with Derrida. Wait, Never mind. I don’t think anyone really knows what Derrida means. Skip him. ))
Then there is your own theory. Before putting pen to paper (boy! talk about an outdated cliché) you should know what history means to you. What are the guiding principles which lead your research and how you create what you create. In other words, you must have your own philosophy of history.
“Consider history as an art.”
No, I don’t think so. Art, when it is well done, is an affective endeavor meant to speak to others through affections. History is a craft. It is like building a house. There are good builders and poor builders. There are good historians and poor historians. But it is a craft that can be learned. You can teach someone to be a good researcher. You can teach how to think in a logical manner. You can even teach someone to write clearly and well. It is a craft. Work at it hard enough and you will be good. If I work at being an artist the rest of my life I will still suck.
Critical Distance II
“The problem is really quite simple, though: Where historical writing is often written to prove a point (typically in one of the theoretical realms mentioned in my previous post), historical action is never performed for similar reasons. Historical figures live and act in a relentlessly multifarious matrix of values, beliefs, and possibilities. They link and unlink their purposes at will. They do things that they know they ought not to do by any rational standard at all; they do things that they themselves could never explain. They improvise. They act on preponderances of motives — and sometimes on no motives whatsoever.”
I must again take issue with you. One could write a very detailed account of changes in rural France in the 18th century but if there is no point to it except to write a nice story about it, it has little utility except those who need the results of this research. By the way, that is not the public. Most pedestrian historians can write the “what” of the story. Most anyone with the background can write about the breakdown of the estates in rural France at the end of the Early Modern period. The exceptional historian writes about why this occurred. Solve the why. Solve the problem.
I remember when I first joined a Fortune 500 company as a lowly market researcher. I was given a research problem. With my skills as a historical researcher learned in route to my PhD, I tore the problem apart from various angles and laid it out clearly. Afterwards I presented the research. The Vice President of Marketing turned to me and said “What should we do?” I sat there with egg on my face. I knew the problem inside and out. But I had failed to solve the problem. I failed to even try to solve the problem. They were not asking what to do but rather what I thought they should do. It was then that I realized that I was expected to be a problem solver.
When I taught undergraduates, I began with an outline of how I wanted research papers structured. They were to present the problem and the solution to the problem. They were to breakdown the problem and the supports for their solution. They were then expected to summarize the problem and the solution. There were other ways of presentation but I wanted them to master the technique of structured problem solving. This would be of use to them no matter what profession they entered.
“Academic monographs, and especially academic articles, tend to suffer from the habit of writing history as mere argument, rather than writing history as art. For an article to be judged a success, it must participate in a historiographic debate. Yet often the general public will not even know that such a debate exists. This is not the way to win greater interest in our work, and if historians want to reverse the rampant de-professionalization of the field, they have no choice but to go public. Write histories that people want to read, and people will pay us for writing them again.”
I think this misses the point. If you want to be an academic historian then you write for the Priesthood. If you want to be a professional historian then you write for the public. If you are a non-academic historian you can write for whomever you chose. In all these cases, if you don’t have a point i.e., solve a problem why should people read what you write. Even fiction must have a plot that ends with a solution.
Yes, life is messy but it is up to the historian to weed out what is relevant and what is not. The historian must put structure to a seemingly unstructured situation. This is where your personal philosophy of history comes into play. Because, underneath all there is meaning. We don’t do things for no meaning. The meaning may not be known by the actor but it is there. It may not be rational but it is still there. It is up to the historian to find that meaning (there may be multiple parts but not too many). The brain/mind abhors confusion. It evolved to create order out of confusion and to solve problems. This is how we survived as a species. We learned to identify problems and then solve problems. We are problem solving entities. If you are good at this, you will succeed in life. The world doesn’t have enough good problem solvers. If you are good at it in your historical studies, you will be good at it anywhere.
Critical Distance III
When I was finished with my PhD program I had a wife, two kids, and a third on the way. There were also no jobs. I had to support my family so I asked myself what do I like to do. I love research so I got a job in market research. I enjoyed it. At night I went back and got my MBA. I’ve been a marketing manger and a marketing consultant. I loved developing solutions to problems through research.
You need to ask yourself what do you really like to do. If it is teaching then get a teaching job at a private school, community college, overseas, etc. Or go back and get a teaching certificate and teach in high school. If it is prestige, then get into political research, work you way up and become an expert. If you like writing and want to get paid for it, go into journalism. Small newspapers and magazines always need good articles. They may first pay by the article. The next step is to work full-time for a small paper. Then work your way up. Your research skills and your writing skills will open doors. By the way, while you’re at the Lib of Cong, network. You get more jobs and better jobs by knowing someone than any other way. Or, get a permanent job there at the Lib of Cong. What a great way to become a non-academic historian. If you hate the politics of academia, this is a good way to go.
Enough of shutting off my mouth (or should that be shutting off my fingers?). By the way, do you know of any good blogs that discuss historiography (the philosophy of history)?
I wish you all the best in finding what you want.
Rich Knapton