Second Thoughts on the Job Crisis: The Profession

Abstract

Z CL. S \ X Second Thoughts on theJob Crisis THE PROFESSION by William W. Freehling a believe that the historicalprofessionfaces an employment as well as an intellectual crisis. In 1999, when I spoke at a breakfast at The Historical Society's national conference, I argued that oldergenerations ofhistorians must no longer allow deans tofoist an impossiblejob situation on youngergenerations. I urged that, withfullprofessors allowing administrators afree hand to establish the hiring environment, a horrendous plight confronts mostfresh PhDs. Few aspiring teachers start with tenure trackpositions, replete with the traditional benefits, salaries, and research support. Most endurepart-time employment, at leastfor severalyears. Many have to cobble together a course at one institution, a course at another, and more courses at others,just to earn a subsistence wage. The exhausting workyields no medical insurance , no travelgrants, and no opportunity to write history. And the olderprofessors, havingsuffered none ofthis, have done little tofight the travesty. I emphasized that currently employed faculty could forge an alliance between have and have-not professors, against irresponsible administrators. Professors could use their moment of retirement as a weapon against deans' preference for part-time replacements. It every healthy professor refused to retire until the dean agreed to spend 75 percent of the salary savings on full-time replacements , administrators would have little choice but to give many more of our younger colleagues the initial job conditions that furthered our careers. I also argued that PhD-granting departments have the obligation to establish postdoctoral thrcc-to-fivc-year instructorships for the best of their own new PhDs with decent salaries, benefits, and research/writing opportunities). And I suggested that every graduate department of history must base its admissions on the number of PhDs that it could reasonably hope to place m academic tenure track jobs. A war Liter I have some second thoughts about this last suggestion. My limited-admission concept was based on a Neanderthal view: that job opportunities only exist in the universo íes. I he profession badlv needs an expanded professional education to seize advantage of the expanding opportunities for historians beyond the academy. I he old graduate education presumed that the jobs were in the universities and that "publish or perish" was the condition of employment. Thus, criticizing and producing scholarlv monographs monopolized the training of historians. PhDs became expert in«ruing for each other, especially tor fellow specialists who might offer them the only job on the horizon. Whether or not this educational situation fostered good history, it temporarily fostered a golden age of academic employment tor my generation . Ihat is now a world we haw lost. Most Americans no longer learn their history in the university classroom, much less from the scholars' monographs . Our public—and we must remake it ours—relishes history as never before, but it is history taught in community colleges, on television, in movie houses, inside museums, at historical sites, in magazines, and in nonmonographic kxiks written for popular consumption. So huge a demand—exactly the demand Licking in the academic marketplace—has generated rich employment opportunities tor those properly trained. Training devoted exclusively to publishing monographs can be the wrong training, except maybe to perish before von publish. Some may respond that training in how to make history popular is too antischolarly to be part of a scholar's highest education. But what is unscholarlv about teaching the most sophisticated historv where those who want to learn happen to be located? It is, after all, sophisticated teaching that most of our graduate students have always considered their highest calling. Fewer than IO percent of history PhD theses arc ever published, and fewer than IO percent of the published authors ever unie a second book. Instead, the vasi majority of history PhDs haw always spent a happy, highly productive professional life bringing their insights and knowledge to students. The only difference now is that most of the booming number oí interested students are not located in the tenure-granting universities . Easing the employment woes of our PhDs is partly a matter of apply- ing the traditional capitalist remedy: ¿o where the action is. Bv failing to train our students to educate beyond the university, we indirectly consign that...