2009 ASTR Conference

I was invited to speak on this panel in two capacities: as the chair of our joint ASTR/ATHE committee on the National Research Council assessment of doctoral programs, and as a graduate dean. Especially in this latter role, I’ve been able to develop some overarching sense of what appears to be going on with graduate education in the humanities, especially in the current, straightened budget climate.

During the 2008-09 academic year, as budgetary crises hit many of our campuses, we struggled to gain an understanding of the magnitude of the problem. This year, many institutions are implementing new financial plans, in a climate of curtailed resources, to stabilize and strategize for future development. Among leading doctoral institutions—and I will limit my remarks today to these schools—there appears to be consensus that protecting the academic core of research and teaching is paramount. Moreover, institutional leaders understand the integral relationship between the recruitment and retention of outstanding faculty and graduate students. Together, these constituencies’ labors enable institutions to retain pre-eminence in research and in teaching—especially at the undergraduate level, where tuition revenues play a significant role in budgetary considerations. Institutional leaders understand, moreover, that research in the arts and humanities has nowhere near the level of external support through grants and fellowships as other disciplines, and there appears to be an ongoing commitment to support for the arts and humanities, despite significant reductions in endowment payouts.

Last year, while campuses tried to get a handle on the extent of the crisis, they opted to freeze spending in a number of areas, including faculty hiring. And many searches that had been advertised early in the year were then cancelled. We don’t have firm data on the final number of jobs filled by the end of the 2008-09 year, but we do have some preliminary search figures, just released by the Modern Language Association (MLA). According to the tallies, there was almost a 25% decline in the number of positions posted by English departments between 2007-08 and 2008-09. This marks “the largest single-year decrease in the thirty-four-year history” of the MLA’s tracking.[1] I want to emphasize a couple of points here: first, schools understand that they will lose competitiveness if they don’t continue to recruit new faculty, and we are already seeing a modest rebound this year. Anecdotally, we hear that some schools even hope to take advantage of the current situation to recruit the strongest candidates possible, knowing that competitors may still not be able to do so. While it’s too early to tell if the searches listed this year will all move forward, ultimately we may well see more real hires in 2009-10, as searches now listed have a better likelihood of being funded.

In anticipation of this session, I sent out earlier this fall a brief survey to theatre and performance studies DGSs around the country, to collect data on doctoral admissions, funding, and placement. Many thanks to everyone who responded. I want to summarize my preliminary results for you, and then make some suggestions for how we might use this data within our doctoral programs.

The good news is that, despite the difficult academic job market last year, it appears that a number of our programs were able to place students. Although some programs told me that fewer students were on the market than in previous years, no doubt because of the economy, the majority had about the same number of job seekers as usual. Some schools reported an understandable drop in the number of tenure-track placements, but others reported that their tenure-track placement record remained stable. More schools reported contracts offered in non-tenure-tack posts, and, not surprisingly, indicated that employment in such positions was at the same or higher levels than in recent years. Similarly, a greater number of students were hired in non-teaching or non-academic positions than previously, and more students could not find any job; we also saw a significant rise in the percentage of students who appear to be leaving academia.

For the current academic year, graduate programs matriculated the same or higher numbers of graduate students than previously. However, increases are not projected for the coming year; most programs plan to recruit at the same or lower levels. Thankfully, most schools do not anticipate a reduction in funding to support doctoral students, at least for next year.

So, what does this data tell us? Obviously, we had not anticipated the financial crisis, and there was no way we could have known, when we admitted doctoral students 5 or 6 years ago, what their job market would look like. We can all be thankful that a number of our students found work—any work—in this challenging economy. That said, we need to be mindful of the increase in the number of students who appear to have chosen to leave, or felt compelled to leave the academy. Of course, ASTR and other organizations have long emphasized the applicability of graduate training for a number of professions within and outside academia, but the key difference here is the issue of necessity—it is one thing to have students voluntarily seek non-academic posts; it is quite another when they have no choice but to do so. We know that, even if the economy improves, there will be a lag period on the job market, and it is unclear if there will ever be a rebound of any magnitude. This suggests the increased importance of preparing our students for a range of career options, at the same time that we must continue to help our students be as competitive as possible in a very tight academic job market.

The reality for the next few years at least is that there will be a backlog in the academic hiring pool. More emerging scholars with Ph.D. in hand who did not land tenure-track jobs this past year will be competing against our ABDs who anticipate entering the work force next year. Individual schools and national organizations are addressing this issue in various ways. The American Council of Learned Societies, for example, has created a new post-doc for recent Ph.D.s that would provide them several years’ employment. Some individual humanities programs are voluntarily reducing the size of their entering doctoral classes, so that they can provide funding for current students for additional years, hopefully bridging the worst job-hunting seasons. And some institutions are committing to hiring their own students in temporary positions. Yet these strategies alone will not provide all the employment needed.

As we enter into another admissions cycle, I hope we will all be mindful of the uncertainties that our current and incoming students face. In my day-to-day interactions with graduate students, I am seeing a level of anxiety that I have not witnessed before. Students are genuinely panicking about the job market, and their fears may not be exaggerated. I would welcome comments on what your own institutions are doing to address these issues, as we work towards developing strategies and best practices to guide our students and our colleagues through this most difficult period.

[1] “Report on the MLA Job Information List,” MLA Newsletter 41.4 (Winter 2009), 1. The MLA did not include searches that were initially posted, and then cancelled, so the percentages should reflect actual searches.

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