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• Higher ed’s dilemma: too many docs, not enough ports.

By ANTHONY GRAFTON [Chronicle of Higher Education] – In 1972, the first year for which accurate statistics exist, almost 1,200 new Ph.D.’s competed for just over 600 new teaching jobs. Except for two short periods in the late 1980s and the 2000s, the number of openings in history departments has consistently fallen short, sometimes by a very wide margin, of the number of doctorates awarded. As public contributions to higher education shrink, state budgets contract, and a lagging economy takes its toll on endowments and family incomes, there is little reason to expect the demand for tenure-track faculty members to expand.

As many observers have noted, this is not a transient “crisis.” It’s the situation we have lived with for two generations. And it’s not likely to change for the better, unless someone figures out how to work magic on the university budgets that lead administrators to opt for flexible, contingent positions rather than tenure-track jobs. AHA supports and joins efforts to convert contingent jobs to tenure-track ones—but it’s unrealistic to expect those efforts to pay off on a large scale. We owe it to our students and to our profession to think more broadly.

Yet graduate programs have been achingly reluctant to see the world as it is. For all the innovation in the subjects and methods of history, the goal of the training remains the same: to produce more professors.

The unchanged language of supervisors and students reflects that. We tell students that there are “alternatives” to academic careers. We warn them to develop a “Plan B” in case they do not find a teaching post. And the very words in which we couch this useful advice make clear how much we hope they will not have to follow it—and suggest, to many of them, that if they do have to settle for employment outside of academe, they should crawl off home and gnaw their arms off.

Continued at The Chronicle of Higher Education | More Chronicle & Notices.

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