Graduate Studies and the Job Market

Abstract

FOR MANY YEARS THE RELATION BETWEEN graduate study and the job market was temporal and sequential; one followed the other. You entered the job market when graduate study was at or nearing its end. For roughly two decades, from 1970 to 1990, a seriously inadequate market haunted graduate study; it was an unspeakable other that no constituency-neither graduate students nor faculty members-much wanted to think about or address openly. New PhDs often enough endured years of agonized selfrecrimination and anger, but until the worm of unemployment actually began to eat at the mature apple of a student's doctoral program, the decay remained unseen. Then in the 1990s, unevenly, haphazardly, the bad news began to percolate down through the halcyon years of faux apprenticeship. The MLA's Graduate Student Caucus became more visible and activist. Now, if decreased applications to graduate programs should prove a long-term trend, we may have to conclude that the bad news about professorial careers has actually reached the undergraduate population. Of course, not everyone has participated in this scene of recognition. Once again, we anticipate the seasonal migration of wishful thinking among the endangered species of tenured professors. Every one of our medievalists got jobs last year. had sixty percent success rate this year on the job Thank God we've increased TA teaching loads and let their salaries slip in relation to cost-of-living increases. We're training our students for the real world. should be charging these postdocs tuition. Apprenticeship now moves into a new phase-postdoctoral infantilization. The more self-satisfied and delusional among the senior professoriat sail on toward doom full of bluster and glad tidings. They are a tremendous impediment in the way of reforming the profession and addressing the future we face. John Lombardi, the president (now the former president) of the University of Florida, declared in the Chronicle of Higher Education in 1999 that the job market reflects economic forces out of our control. So said an MLA president, Sandra Gilbert, but a few years ago: It's the economy, stupid. But it's nothing of the kind. My own campus has shifted fifteen percent of full-time faculty lines to cover start-up costs for new buildings. This is hardly a decision taken in a galaxy far far away. Yale hoards its endowment profits when it could spend a portion of them to hire new tenured faculty members. Hardly a decision taken in an economic domain impervious to campus attention. In California, prisons get the money stripped from higher education. I believe we call that politics, or at least the politics of public sector economics, not the much-vaunted pure and impersonal economics of the market. And on campus after campus the football coach, the business faculty, and other worthies earn hundreds of thousands of dollars while TAs and parttimers are denied a living wage. These practices are not the result of impersonal forces beyond our control. We have met the enemy and it is us. Can anything be done? A great deal, actually. Especially if the key to everything else is not a series of impersonal forces out of our control but the practices of higher education itself. The first step, to be sure, is to admit the extent of the crisis. The MLA in recent years has done a good deal to publicize the difficulties facing unemployed or underemployed PhDs. There will no doubt be modest increases and modest decreases in the number of tenure-track jobs available over the next decade. No sane observer of the job system, however, could anticipate that we will ever create