Newsgroups: bit.listserv.history
Date:         Wed, 30 Dec 1992 18:14:47 -0500
From:         Donald Robert Shaffer <dshaffer@WAM.UMD.EDU>
Subject:      Academic Job Prospects in History: Trends
Comments: To: history@rutvm1.bitnet

Dear Colleagues,

I had the opportunity yesterday of attending a most fascinating
session at the annual conference of the American Historical
Association (AHA) in Washington D.C.  It dealt with the prospects
for the academic historian's job market during the 1990s.  The
session consisted of a panel discussion by members of the
Professional Division of the AHA.  The following lengthy
description of the session is based on my notes of the session.  The
panel indicated that its proceedings would be published in a
future issue of _Perspectives_, the newsletter of the AHA.  This
will be a long post: hence I make following summary of essential
points, followed by a fuller description of each panelists
comments.  I will be going on vacation from Jan. 2-18, 1993: if you
wish to reply to this message in the interim, please send me your
reply privately, as well as on the list, because I will be soon
setting HISTORY to "nomail".  Send your replies to Don Shaffer at
dshaffer@wam.umd.edu.

The basic purpose of the session was to describe the ambivalent
trends in the academic history job market.  While projections
increasing enrollments in the 1990s and a large number of
professors on the verge of retirement seemed to indicate a few
years ago that a new boom in employment in history departments
would begin the mid-1990s, prospects are no longer so rosy,
although they are by no means as glum as the employment bust
of the late 1970s and early 1980s.  Lack of growth and
retrenchment in higher education will dampen demand for tenure-track professors,
 while new Ph.Ds will have to compete
not only with other new degree holders, but also a pool of
unemployed doctoral holders left over from the bust period.
Administrators, straight-jacketed by tax and tuition caps, will
make increasing use of graduate students, part-time and
temporary instructors, as well as more onerous teaching loads
and larger classes to cope with the dilemma of increased demand,
but static or shrinking resources to meet that demand.  They will
increasingly be looking more for generalists and Non-West area
specialists, rather than specialist faculty, both to fill gaps in
departmental course offerings and meet calls for less Eurocentric
teaching.

Paul Conkin, of Vanderbilt University, discussed macro trends in
higher education, the history profession, and the American
economy in general.  He indicated that the projected boom in the
employment of American Ph.D. historians, in tenure-track
positions that was expected to occur in the 1990s will be retarded
by the recent lack of growth and retrenchment in American
education.   He was quite pessimistic about the prospects for
growth in American higher education in the 1990s.   The boom in
higher education funding in the 1980s, brought on by higher
incomes in the 1960s and 1970s and the increasing desire of
parents for their children to attend college during the same
period (due to a well founded belief that a college education was a
prerequisite to earning a higher income and achieving economic
mobility) has come to an end.  The economic squeeze of the early
1990s and present debt loads have created a population resistant
to further tax or tuition increases.  Hence, Conkin believes there
is no basis for growth in higher education in the 1990s, despite a
mildly improving economy at present.  Additional resources
created by an improving economy will be used for debt payment,
maintaining crumbling infrastructure, and dealing with
environmental problems and crises in the Third World.  The
bottom line for academic historians will be lack of growth in the
number of jobs, more existing positions being temporary or part-
time in nature, and increased teaching loads for existing
professors to deal with projected increase in college enrollment
during the 1990s (due to the arrival on campuses of the children
of baby boomers).  Conkin projects that about 600 tenure-track
positions in history will open up, per year, until 2010.  The
continued low numbers of history Ph.Ds will keep the job market
from becoming the serious problem it was in the late 1970s and
early 1980s.  (Incidentally, Conkin asserted that studies show that
history Ph.Ds have the highest attrition rate of all graduate
fields--50%, and the longest average completion time--8 years.
He attributes these figures to the proliferation of marginal
graduate history programs during the 1960s and 1970s.  He claims
the higher quality programs are getting their students through
faster.)  Conkin claimed that most history Ph.Ds of the 1990s will
eventually find employment in academia, but competition for
positions will remain fierce due to the pool of unemployed Ph.Ds
left over from the 1980s.  About 50% of Ph.Ds will have to accept
non-tenure track employment initially.  In short, Conkin
indicated that the job market looks better than it has been in the
last decade, but will not attain the prosperity it achieved in the
1960s, despite a projected growth in college enrollments and
faculty retirements in the 1990s.

Nell Painter, of Princeton University, discussed trends in the
supply of history Ph.Ds.  She indicated that there was a shrinkage
in history Ph.Ds after 1973 (1215) bottoming out in 1985 (543).
The number of Ph.Ds awarded has grown slightly since 1985: in
1991--691.  Painter indicated the number of Ph.Ds awarded to
women has risen in relative terms in the past twenty years: from
13.3% in 1970 to 37.5% in 1991.  However, she asserted the gender
parity of Ph.Ds awarded in history is not as even as it has become
in other fields.  (Painter was not specific about which fields were
doing better in this regard.)  In terms of graduate enrollment,
39% of enrollees were women, compared to 54% in the humanities
in general, and 49% in all fields.  Hence, the number of women in
history graduate programs remains relatively low.  She also finds
their absolute numbers have been relatively steady.  The number
of minority Ph.Ds in history also remains quite low.  The bulk of
minority Ph.Ds have been awarded to African Americans,
although a growing percentage are going to Hispanics and
Asians.  She describes the presence of Native Americans in
graduate history programs as "infinitesimal."  While Painter
indicates that both women and minorities (herself included in
both categories--she is a black women) have benefited from
affirmative action policies, that the number of women of color
among history Ph.Ds remains quite small (only 3.1% of Ph.D.
history program applicants).  She cites this as evidence that
white male historians should have little fear of being victims of
affirmative action policies, since the number of minority women
earning Ph.Ds in history is tiny.  The main competition that
white men face in the academic history job market comes from
other white males or white females.  As further evidence that
women do not have an automatic advantage in hiring, she cites
the fact that women were relatively more successful as job
applicants when coming against men, in only 5 out of the last 11
years, and then were only slightly more successful.  In short,
Painter indicates there are not enough women and minorities in
history to truly challenge the still relatively dominate position of
white males in the profession.  Indeed, she finds it disturbing
that when departments do seek to hire women or minorities they
do so too often in either women's history or minority history
fields.  In other words, some departments seem to be creating
academic-interest ghettos for women and minorities.  The
tradgedy, Painter complains, is that these positions in women's
history or African American history often go unfilled for some
time because departments insist on filling them with either
females or blacks; qualified men or whites are ignored for these
jobs, while women and minorities are often unsuccessful when
they attempt to apply for appointments in more "general" fields.
She also indicated that discrimination against faculty spouses, but
particularly age discrimination are also looming problems.  Older
itinerant Ph.Ds of the "lost generation" of the late 1970s and
1980s find that departments prefer new Ph.Ds.  Painter indicated
the AHA is trying to deal with problem by discouraging phrases
in advertisements in _Perspectives_ that are clearly age
discriminatory; clauses such as "Ph.D. must have been awarded
after ..."

Susan Socolow, of Emory University and vice-president, AHA
Professional Division, discussed trends in the academic job
market for historians in the last decade, but particularly the last
two years (1991 and 1992).  She indicated that the number of
advertised jobs rose during the 1980s until 1990, but has fallen
during 1991-92.  For 1992, the distribution of job advertisements
by field was as follows: United States --35%;  Europe--28%; "Non-
West"--24%; and 15% of the advertisements being too
ambiguously worded to determine which field they were
advertising for. Socolow indicated that geographic distribution of
advertisements (that is, the location of the appointment) was:
foreign--4%; Midwest--24%; Northeast--30%; Southeast--19%
(incidentally, the only region to see an increase in
advertisements from 1991 to 1992); Southwest--6%; West--14%.
The breakdown of the types of assistant professor--76%; associate
professor--4%; full professor--3%; endowed--1%; and for 10%
there was no information given about the level of the
appointment.  Socolow said her analysis showed a drop in the
percentage of tenure-track appointments as a percentage of all
appointments from 1991--85% to 1992--80%, a relative percentage
of advertisements for United States history positions compared to
other fields declined from 1991--36% to 1992--32%.  (For 1992, she
indicated that the distribution of advertisements for American
sub-fields was: Colonial/Early National--14%; Antebellum/
Nineteenth Century--13%;Postbellum/Twentieth Century--26%; No Information--47%).
  The relative percentage of European and
Non-West positions remained relatively constant.  There was an
increase in the number of "no information" positions (where the
school does not indicate or is ambiguous about what field it is
hiring in) from 9% to 14%.  Socolow interpreted this increase in
"no information".positions advertised--particularly within
United States history--to mean that increasing numbers of
schools are going on what she calls a"fishing expeditions":
looking for generalist, jack-of-all-trade historians that can teach
courses in a variety of fields, or trying to see what will walk in
the door rather than specifying particular qualities they would
like in interviewees.  In short, for 1991-92, Socolow found a
surplus of Ph.Ds entrants in U.S. history, but not in the European
and Non-West fields.

Anand Yang, of the University of Utah, talked about trends in
employment in Non-West fields.  He indicated, that while
estimating trends for employment here is difficult due to the
complex interplay of factors, that the future seems to bode
reconfiguration and expansion.  Japan, in particular, is
becoming a booming field due to generous funding of historians
by Japanese concerns.  However, the general expansion of Non-
West fields will be the product of increasingly intimate global ties
and the growing popularity of world history as opposed to
western civilization as a core undergraduate course.  Yang
complained that most graduate history programs were doing very
little to encourage students in more mainstream fields to help fill
this growing demand for world historians by taking Non-West
course work or exam fields, leaving students in area studies in a
good position to monopolize the positions advertised for Non-West
fields and World Civilization.

Barbara Alpern Engel, of the University of Colorado, Boulder,
talked mainly about what Ph.Ds could expect in terms of job
conditions once they found employment.  She projected a
continued increase in undergraduate history majors, after the
long drop that bottomed out in 1985.  This trend and general
increases in college and university enrollments will increase
history class enrollments, but Engel foresees little possibility that
this increase in demand will be met by more tenure track
positions because administrators will use graduate teaching
assistants more intensively, part-time instructors, and temporary
appointments, in the short-term, to deal with the enrollment
increase; and in the long-run through increased class sizes and
teaching loads.  Engel also discussed trends in graduate history
enrollments.  Her most interesting point in this regard was that
the current recession has actually been a boon to graduate
enrollments in history (as prospective students have had less
alternative opportunities).

The panelists seemed cautious about speculating in regard to any
impact the incoming Clinton administration would have on the
academic history employment picture.  They were skeptical that
Clinton's campaign rhetoric in support of higher would translate
into better job prospects, because most funding for higher
education would remain at the depressed state government level,
and they doubted that the administration would accord history
any priority status for increasing federal funding (assuming
Clinton was able to achieve such).

Donald Shaffer
Ph.D. History Student
University of Maryland, College Park
dshaffer@wam.umd.edu
Comments: Gated by NETNEWS@AUVM.AMERICAN.EDU