2009 ASTR Conference

By Evan Darwin Winet

Before I start, I want to take a moment to thank Sonja and Tamara and the conference committee for inviting me to serve on this panel. I want to thank Jill Dolan specifically for suggesting that I should, after I had barraged my colleagues on the conference committee with a steady stream of neo-Marxist invective against the systemic oppression of the lumpen-professoriate. I want to thank all my treasured friends at ASTR. You have been my academic family for 15 years. Many of you have asked me over the past few days why, since I am now a law student, am I here? The answer is a stubborn and recalcitrant love for this vocation that will not go gently and will not be silent. It seems appropriate that I’ve been working theoretically with discourses of spectrality and haunting for a while. In that spirit, I say: boo!

I started as a 1L at the UC Hastings College of Law this past August. Over the past 3 months, I have allowed my mind to be colonized by a hermeneutics, methodology and epistemology that is rigorous, intriguing and far more flexible than most people realize, but radically different from the prevailing discourses of our discipline. In the past few days, I’ve stepped back to look with some wonder at the astonishing and somewhat alarming frameworks that now reside in my consciousness. And I’ve also listened to your conversations and our conversations with fresh ears. The very grammar of our academic discourse has suddenly regained an element of poetic force.

Legal reasoning exercises its poetic moment in the selection and framing of details out of a historical event. It is once that piece of history is framed that discourse becomes bound by genealogy, tracing back the precedents that yoke a legal premise to that fragment. Frame the fragment differently, and the seemingly stoic mechanism of the common law may call forth an entirely different lineage of legal ghosts. Anyone who thinks that common law precedent is positivistic misses this poetic act on which the entire method depends.

Our current methods, by contrast, postulate from ever-shifting directions at objects that rarely come fully into view. Our syntax is filled with outrageous compilations of half-utterances, carving out the air in the vicinity of the object. Our citations do not establish binding precedence, but bloom into wonderous objects of their own, sometimes only hinting at an instrumentality in relation to the original object. Most lawyers would find our language spectacularly inefficient and illogical, a mess of conclusory assertions devoid of real analysis.

I, however, take considerable pleasure in standing on the threshold of a fascinating inter-discipline. I don’t have time right here to talk about how I hope to bridge the substance of legal study to my previous concerns with Indonesian, Islamic and postcolonial theatres. I hope to come back to some future conference with that. However, at what lawyers would call a “procedural” level, I sense the possibility of opening up new fissures that I had not previously imagined.

In other words, I may have jumped off the ship of academic theatre, but I’m still swimming nearby.

That said, I want to reinforce what Ellen Gainor just said about scholars leaving the profession in recent times not by choice, but by necessity.

I beg you to recognize that what I am doing here is finding a productive and constructive path forward from a painful and reluctant choice to leave my chosen path as a performance scholar. I made that choice for personal and family reasons, after 8 years, to stop stringing together visiting theatre positions.

I may go all the way through and become a practicing lawyer, and if so I hope to find a path that inflects my legal work with my abiding concerns regarding the performance of nationality and spectral identities. Or I might find my way back into one of those ever-dwindling stable positions in our discipline, and use my new legal skills and frameworks to chart some new direction in my performance research. Maybe along the lines of some of the ideas I just expressed.

I’m reminded, however, of a discussion of melodrama in yesterday’s global socialism working group. I am not spinning a providential narrative here.

We must never let ourselves become complicit with the neoliberal administrative logic that spins choices like mine of “alternate careers” as evidence of the fungibility of the Ph.D. As evidence, that is, that the system is working fine.

A system that leaves perhaps a third of all degree-holders without the jobs they prepared for is not working fine. It is wasteful. It is deceitful.

About a month ago, I conducted a brief survey of doctoral programs. It contained 5 quantitative questions about PhD production and placement and the gain and loss of doctoral faculty over the past 10 years. So, I was not taking the current economic crisis as my framework, but rather looking at what has been “typical” over the past decade. 11 programs, or about a quarter of them, responded. Here’s what they suggested:

1) 2/3 of the people who have received a PhD in theatre or performance studies in the past decade are currently in a tenure track job.
2) The success of individual programs in this regard varies enormously from a 100% placement rate to as low as 50%. There is NO correlation between this success in placement and the national prestige of the program or the profile of the students in research. For example U of Oregon places a relatively low emphasis on research, publication and conference attendance. There’s one person from U of Oregon on this year’s ASTR conference program. However, Oregon has had a nearly perfect record of placing its PhDs in tenure track theatre jobs over the past decade.
3) A few of the programs surveyed had a net gain in research faculty over the past decade. Most stayed the same or declined. Overall, the number of research faculty in doctoral programs declined slightly.
4) The number of research faculty positions filled in doctoral programs is about one quarter the number of PhDs who graduated and received tenure track jobs.
5) So at least ¾ of the Ph.Ds graduated in the past decade who are currently in TT jobs must be working somewhere other than in doctoral programs. At least 95 of the working graduates of the 11 programs surveyed.
6) A third of the people who got Ph.D.s in our discipline in the past decade are not now in TT jobs in our discipline.

I expect that these claims prompt many of you to think of a few follow-up questions worth asking, or of people poorly represented by those numbers. I, for example, was hired 5 times by departments of theatre and performance studies in the past decade, and am currently attending law school. This survey doesn’t come close to representing my experience. But that’s the point. I find it staggering how much we’ve resisted knowing about the state of the profession. Information that doctoral students and applicants to our programs might find pretty interesting. I’m very heartened that since I first set out to do this myself, both Esther and Ellen have stepped up with initiatives of their own.

Within the schools I surveyed, 126 fresh PhDs got TT theatre jobs, but there was a net gain of only 31 FTE positions within the doctoral programs themselves. Of course, only a small portion of those positions went to fresh Ph.Ds. Others were more senior hires or part of the endless game of musical chairs between scholars who already have stable positions and seek to “trade up” or simply to stay in motion.

So where are all these fresh PhDs with TT theatre jobs working? Undoubtedly there are many answers to that question, but it’s a fair bet that they’re mostly working at places with different opportunities and expectations for research than at doctoral universities. They’re probably working at places where they need to handle big theatre history courses. They’re probably working at places where they need to be able to teach some aspect of production. And they’re probably working in departments where most if not all of their colleagues have pretty thin research dossiers themselves. That means that most of them will need to work harder to find relevant mentorship to meet whatever standards of research apply.

Anecdotally, it seems that many PhD students dream of working in a small liberal arts college where they can be artist-scholars while avoiding the vicious, punitive escalation of research expectations at big universities. But they should know that expectations for faculty in competitive smaller schools are under strains that can be hard to predict. Research, teaching and service requirements can always be used in punitive ways.

What kind of follow-up questions should we be asking?

Do we dare move from the kind of statistics that Esther gathered regarding who is being admitted to our programs and what they are doing there to ask what students with what training and background and identities are getting jobs? Do we want to be able to compare what percentage of african-american theatre scholars with PhDs get jobs to how many anglo theatre scholars with PhDs get jobs? How much do we want to know about our diversity?

I want to ask, what should ASTR be doing for the large majority of emerging scholars who are NOT in the tenure stream as doctoral faculty at Research I Universities?

What should ASTR be doing for the large number of scholars (maybe around 250 in the past decade, extrapolating roughly from the sample) who have PhDs in our discipline but not TT jobs in departments of theatre and performance studies?

And what can be done to attend to the fact that it is increasingly unlikely that PhDs will be hired directly from grad school into the last job they’ll ever need? Career paths will become much more circuitous than they were for most of the senior faculty at this conference. We were treated last night to the spectacle of a robust Marvin Carlson, flanked by Joe Roach and Tom Postlewait, waving like Evita from a landing as we celebrated the first fifty years of his career. How many of us can possibly make it that far under current conditions? We must prepare for meandering odysseys attended by rough exigencies and managed by fickle gods. Those of us fortunate enough to have found our Ithacas must see that these are not “checkered pasts”, but rather the systemic norm.

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