In the Service of Clio

Administrative Post 15

2011-12-20T15:39:00.000-05:00

This blog is taking a vaction for the Christmas holidays. See you in 2012 with some new posts and a new series.

Blog CV (105): The Plan B Debate Revisited

2011-12-09T11:48:00.000-05:00

Today's entry is a lengthy article from The Chronicle of Higher Education about alternative employment. The article is entitled "More Universities Break the Taboo and Talk to Ph.D.'s About Jobs Outside Academe." The author is Audrey Williams June and it appeared in the November 6, 2011 issue. It is related to this blog, because it mentions the "Plan B" debate. I think June and her sources exaggerate the attitudes of faculty about alternative careers. My view is that most professors have gone from their student days to their faculty positions and know nothing else. As a result, it is not hostility, but ignorance that accounts for their attitudes and lack of assistance. This article, though, does offer students an opportunity to raise the issue with their mentors. The conversation can start like this: "I was reading the Grafton/Grossman article..." or "The 'In The Service of Clio' blog said..." or "Did you read that article in The Chronicle of Higher Education about alternative employment, what should I be doing?" Here is the article:

A gathering on Ohio State University's campus here last month had the familiar trappings of a traditional college lecture. Graduate students filed into an auditorium, and some cracked open their laptops or pecked the screens of smartphones as they waited for the speaker to begin.

But in one important way, this lecture was different than most they would attend as doctoral students.

The speaker, Paula Chambers, would talk openly about a subject that graduate students tend to discuss in hushed tones among close friends or trusted mentors-or anonymously in online forums. The taboo topic: preparing for nonacademic jobs.

"You're in charge of your career," Ms. Chambers said to the audience of about 200 students in the arts and humanities. "My message to you today is you need to prepare to be versatile."

Her speech was a defining moment for Ohio State, where humanities departments had pushed for an event that would give graduate students information about alternative careers. Interest eventually grew so large that the event was sponsored by the graduate school and the arts and humanities division of the College of Arts and Sciences-home to students in disciplines where a tight academic job market has made alternative careers more attractive.

The invitation to speak at Ohio State was a homecoming of sorts for Ms. Chambers, owner of the Versatile Ph.D., a Web site that supports a community of graduate students in the humanities, social sciences, and hard sciences who want to pursue careers outside higher education or are contemplating such a move. She graduated from Ohio State in 2000 with a Ph.D. in rhetoric and composition, and went on to a nonacademic career of her own.

Her speech was part of a first-time Alternative Career Day, which also included a panel of former graduate students in nonteaching careers, among them the founder and managing partner of a venture-capital firm and the director of admissions and student services at Ohio State's school of public affairs.

"This is like a stamp of approval on what I've been doing and talking about for so long," Ms. Chambers said of the event.

Cultural Barriers
While universities like Ohio State are putting new emphasis on helping Ph.D. students explore nonacademic careers, some research universities have been focused on those efforts for several years. Among them are the University of Pennsylvania and Duke, Harvard, Michigan State, and Yale Universities, which were the founding subscribers to the Versatile Ph.D. last year. They also employ career counselors who cater specifically to graduate students. Those counselors and others meet annually at the Graduate Career Consortium, where alternative career paths for graduate students have recently been a topic of discussion.

Ohio State's graduate-school dean, Patrick Osmer, plays a key role in conversations about post-graduate-school careers at his institution and nationwide. Mr. Osmer, also vice provost for graduate studies, is chair of a new commission set up to examine what graduate students know about their career options and what graduate programs are doing to help their students make the transition into employment. The commission, formed in September by the Council of Graduate Schools and the Educational Testing Service, expects to release a report in April.

"I've been thinking a lot about what we're doing on campus," Mr. Osmer says. "It's important that students and faculty know more about what the opportunities are."

The culture of academe often makes it hard for Ph.D. students to explore those opportunities. When they enter doctoral programs, their professors and many of their peers expect them to become professors-cut from the same cloth as their graduate advisers. Some faculty are against efforts to highlight career paths that don't lead to the professoriate, particularly because their reputations, and those of their graduate programs, hinge on students' finding teaching positions at top institutions.

But advocates for giving graduate students information about multiple career options say the realities of the job market demand it. And for some doctoral students, the work they seek after graduation is not an alternative career-a term that some say relegates nonacademic jobs to second-class status-but the only work they've ever wanted.

'Consolation prize'
Although Ohio State and other colleges across the nation are increasingly working to show graduate students that their degrees can be viewed as more than entry tickets to the professoriate, some Ph.D. students aren't getting the same message from their departments. Students are also not sure of exactly how to pursue alternative careers. And even when faculty members support their students, they usually don't have the expertise to help.

During her presentation, Ms. Chambers said she knew that some of the students in attendance couldn't talk about exploring nonacademic careers with their advisers, or even with their peers. Indeed, fear that their advisers would learn of their interest in alternative careers kept a handful of graduate students approached by a reporter from talking, even anonymously.

"As a rule, faculty have not been seen as friends in this conversation," she says. "That's true nationwide."

One Ph.D. student at a West Coast research university can relate. Last winter she came to grips with something she'd been struggling with since entering graduate school: Life as an academic wasn't for her. She never really liked doing research. The teaching that she once loved, and that she had hoped to do as a professor at a liberal-arts college, lost its appeal. And the academic job market, including in her social-sciences field, was abysmal.

But telling her adviser of her plans-at least at that point-was out of the question. "When I was a first-year grad student, he said, 'We train you to go into academe,'" says the student, now in her fifth year, who didn't want to be identified, because she feared her adviser's reaction to her plans. "It was clear that there weren't supposed to be any other options."

She has a new adviser now, and she doesn't know how he will react when she tells him soon that she won't pursue a position as a professor after she earns her doctorate next year. She has been exploring career options in higher-education administration, academic advising, and student or academic affairs. She has also considered doing research for human-rights groups or the United Nations. Other students in her program have gone on to work outside academe, but "the impression I have is that it's seen as sort of a consolation prize," she says.

No More 'Plan B'
The American Historical Association wants to change negative attitudes about career paths outside higher education. The association this fall strongly urged graduate programs to stop casting tenure-track jobs as the only acceptable career choices for their students-which, by default, makes any other position students may pursue a "Plan B." In a recent essay, Anthony T. Grafton, the association's president, and Jim Grossman, its executive director, called for "No More Plan B."

"We need to ask universities and career centers to be more helpful," says Mr. Grafton, a professor at Princeton University. "I would hope that deans would help with this, too. I think professors, especially, have to mobilize everything they can to help their students."

A new follow-up essay by the two authors suggests ways in which the association, universities, and faculty members could do a better job of exposing graduate students to nonacademic careers and supporting them as they search for such positions.

Mr. Grossman says Mr. Grafton's outspoken support of the issue should make academic historians pay heed to the duo's important message.

"He's one of the top people in his field at one of the top institutions in the country, and he's making this statement that having a Plan B isn't the way to go," Mr. Grossman says. More historians, he says, "recognize that it's in the best interest of their students to think more broadly about what they can do with their degrees."

What the history association is pitching has resonated with people in other humanities disciplines. Carmen Taleghani-Nikazm, an associate professor of German at Ohio State, agrees that the culture in academe has to change.

"I'm very open to all possibilities for my students," she says. "But there are people, mostly senior faculty members, who don't even want to talk about this issue."

The Alternative Career Day events last month could be used as a way to educate students and professors about Ph.D. students' skills that appeal to employers outside higher education, says Ms. Taleghani-Nikazm, who is also graduate-studies director of her department. Among the skills highlighted by the panelists were project management, perseverance, problem solving, and the ability to work independently-all of which are honed in writing a dissertation.

The reluctance in higher education to view graduate students who don't become professors as successful often stems from the linear career paths of most professors, says Katharine S. Brooks, director of liberal-arts career services at the University of Texas at Austin. "They wanted to be professors, and now they are," she says. "It becomes hard for them to see someone else doing something else."

D.J. Hovermale, an Ohio State Ph.D. student, will soon have a career that many faculty wouldn't have steered him toward. He originally wanted to return to his undergraduate alma mater, the University of Kentucky, to teach after earning his doctoral degree in computational linguistics.

When he started his Ph.D., in 2005, he was "feeling great" about the academic job market for scholars in his field, he said during the panel session at the Ohio State event. Although Kentucky didn't have a linguistics department, it was rumored that the university would start one soon. Then the recession hit, and Kentucky cut short its plans to expand.

"There were hundreds of people applying for every job listed," Mr. Hovermale said. "It didn't look like the prospects for getting an academic job were very good."

For Mr. Hovermale, practicality won out. He told his adviser that he was shifting to what was, for him, Plan B. When he completes his Ph.D., in December, he will go to work for the Department of Defense.

Making a Choice
Unlike Mr. Hovermale, Andy Holdsworth knew before he began his doctoral degree in conservation biology at the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities that he wasn't going to become an academic. So he made a point to choose an adviser who would accept his future career path and whose students had gone on to nonacademic careers.

"A lot of advisers don't want to take on people who have career interests like mine," Mr. Holdsworth says. "But mine was an endowed chair, very secure, he was well funded."

Mr. Holdsworth, who completed his Ph.D. in 2006, says he began laying the groundwork for an alternative career during the first semester of his doctoral program. He interviewed conservation scientists who worked at nonprofit groups and at the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources, where he is now a science-policy coordinator.

Many graduate students in the hard sciences are in departments where a precedent has already been set for pursuing a career outside academe, often in industries associated with their fields or in government jobs.

But that's not always the case, says Nathan Connors, who earned a Ph.D. in neuroscience at Minnesota in 2004. He knew that some students went on to work in industries, such as at pharmaceutical or biotechnology companies, but that "there wasn't a whole lot of open discussion about what the alternatives were," he says.

Mr. Connors, however, began thinking about alternatives on his own, even as he applied for a postdoctoral fellowship at Penn. "I was always a pretty strong writer from grade school all the way up," he says. "I thought maybe I could integrate analytical skills from graduate school and connect them with writing."

He also realized during graduate school that it would be difficult to balance being the parent of a young child with life as an academic scientist on the tenure track.

With the support of his postdoctoral adviser, Mr. Connors began to apply for medical-writing positions. He has worked for a regulatory-writing company and a company that publishes research articles in scientific journals. Now he's a freelance science and medical writer.

Mr. Connors empathizes with people who agonize over leaving academe behind. "You've been in school so long, and it's the culture that you know," he says. "To switch out of that is difficult and stressful."

The Value of a Ph.D.
It can also be tough for graduate students to figure out what nonacademic career to pursue. But Ms. Chambers and the other panelists at the Ohio State event advised students to volunteer at nonprofit agencies or other places where the work interests them. People with doctoral degrees, she told the audience, can apply for jobs in the federal government, educational consulting, policy analysis, public history, and finance, among other things.

Chad Allen, an associate professor and director of graduate studies in English at Ohio State, is among the faculty members who want to make alternative careers more accepted for Ph.D.'s. But he says graduate students have to make a tough choice.

"This is a hard thing to talk about because the truth is, to be a successful academic, you have to be really obsessive about your work," Mr. Allen says. "You can't take the time off to pursue other things."

Some of his first-year students were at the Alternative Career Day sessions. "I think they're just curious," he says. "They're thinking, 'Keep your options open.'"

That advice worked for Ms. Chambers, who skipped going on the academic job market altogether and went to work as a grant writer for nearly five years at three nonprofit organizations. Her advisers, although supportive of her decision to pursue a nonacademic career, couldn't offer specific advice about how to land work outside higher education.

That information void pushed Ms. Chambers in 1999 to create an e-mail list called WRK4US, the precursor to the Versatile Ph.D. "It basically became my career," says Ms. Chambers, who managed the list as she wrote her dissertation. She kept it up even while writing grant applications for a living. Last year the list became the Versatile Ph.D., a full-time business venture for Ms. Chambers.

The site, which allows users to participate anonymously in discussion forums on various aspects of nonacademic careers, now has nearly 11,000 individual members, among them graduate students, new Ph.D.'s, faculty members, and people who are already in nonacademic jobs.

Twenty-seven research universities, such as Ohio State, pay subscription fees that support the Web site and give students, faculty, and staff access to premium content that includes first-person narratives from Ph.D.'s in nonacademic careers and archived panel discussions in which graduate students ask questions of those who work outside the professoriate.

"A lot of us think that the future and the health of all of our programs depends, in some sense, on redefining the value of the degree," Mr. Allen says. "The degrees are valuable beyond recreating ourselves on the faculty. And that's a good thing for all of us."

Blog CIV (104): The History Ph.D. as Novelist

2011-12-02T10:30:00.002-05:00

Editorial Note: Today's posting is the third part of three essays that represents a return of the "The History Ph.D. as..." series. This article examines historians who have moved into the world of fiction as novelists. The article is exceptionally long even by internet standards (roughly 4,000 words), so it will be posted on "In the Service of Clio" in three parts. Part one appeared in Blog CII on Monday, November 28, 2011 and part two appeared in Blog CIII on Wednesday, November 30, 2011.

Having a Ph.D. can also be an unusual asset for a novelist. In 1997, Paretsky was a visiting scholar in Oxford and visited the Imperial War Museum, which she called an “incredible archive of everything about the war.” She decided to write a V. I. Warshawski novel that would “bring past and present together” in a novel about the recovery of Holocaust assets issue like dormant insurance policies and bank accounts.

This little story raises an important question: can a historian return to history after writing fiction, be it contemporary or historical in nature? David believes so. “I had no worries, and quickly rattled off the first three chapters of my much-delayed history of the British soldier.” In that vein, Jill Lepore, the David Woods Kemper ‘41 Professor of American History at Harvard University, co-wrote a novel Blindspot (2008) with Jane Kamensky, another historian, and found that fiction writing actually helped her in doing history. “What it turned into—and this is the thing that most surprised me—is that it fed back into my work as an historian,” she explained. “I'm working on Benjamin Franklin now, writing a biography of Franklin and his sister; I feel very close to both of them, as a nonfiction writer, in a way that I don't think I would have felt if we hadn't written this novel.”

How does one become a novelist? What are the detailed steps of publishing in a new venue? The first thing is to have a literary agent. An important note is that agents specialize: some do history, some do romance fiction, some do science fiction, and so on. Make sure you do research and approach the right individual for what you want to write. How? There are plenty of books on publishing and literary agents that you can find in the self-help section of any decent sized bookstore. There are many writers conferences that you can attend, and many feature sessions that give you face-to-face time with agents. This type of personal connection, like in many other fields, helps. Agents are swamped with proposals from aspiring writers and while we would like to think that our writing will sell itself, Tillman observed: “The world isn’t spun that way.”

Some creative writing classes might also be in order. Many schools have MFA programs in creative writing. Enrolling in a degree program is probably not necessary, but many do offer courses that will cover important topics that will be new to the historian such as character development and dramatic structure. Many agents require that first time novelists have a completed manuscript, so the exact sequence in which you go about this task might vary.

Sometimes getting an agent is a difficult thing in and of itself. Cobbs Hoffman methodically researched the agents she contacted and collected many rejections before finding representation. Even then, she had to go through two agents before she found one that successfully sold her book to a major publisher. “You do not necessarily benefit from being represented by a major, major agency.”

Another factor to consider in deciding upon this career path is that publishing is suffering in the national economy, just like most other businesses. Until recently, the publishing industry was always considered a recession proof entertainment medium. Books sold well regardless of the ups and downs in the economy, but the growth of personal, electronic media means now that there are other significant venues for the spending of discretionary income. In the last few years, publishers have been laying off editors and bookstores have been going out of business. Many houses are reluctant to sign new authors even if they have a proven track record publishing in another genre.

The implication is that authors have to be their own marketing machines. The publishers just are not going to be doing the same amount of work that they once did. This implication is more important for novelists than historians. “I learned early on,” Tillman explained, “that bestsellers are not written, they are sold.” Novelists have to be prepared to be on-line, visiting the blogs, using social media websites in addition to doing author events. “It’s more important than ever that authors get heavily involved in marketing their own books,” he added.

Some authors have chosen to go the self-publishing route. Cobbs Hoffman after having two agents tell her they could not sell her novel, decided on this venue, because she had to “do something other than press delete” with her manuscript. Keep in mind, she is an accomplished historian, winning the Allen Nevis Prize for her first book The Rich Neighbor Policy: Rockefeller and Kaiser in Brazil (1992). Carpenter also made that decision after playing with his Antimony manuscript off and on for twenty years: “It’s a way to get your product out there and get it noticed.” Most of the firms that produce self-published books are basically fee driven publishing houses and an author can choose from a number of available services, ranging from editing to marketing. These have additional costs and an author will still have to do a good deal of work in selling the book, finding reviewers, getting promotional blurbs from others, and submitting the book for awards. The problem is, as Carpenter admits, is that 99 percent of self-published work is “junk.”

Why then, would anyone go this route? “You are looking for that John Grisham effect,” Carpenter explained. If an author has something in print, it is easier to start conversations with publishers and agents about transferring to a bigger press. This process happened to Cobbs Hoffman. A major publisher picked up her book after it garnered critical praise and won some book prizes. She admits this would never have happened if she had not self-published the book: “I know for a fact that Random House would never seen it.”

Since this blog is about giving career advice to the new Ph.D., it is important to ask if being a novelist is a legitimate alternative career open to the history Ph.D.? That answer to that question is a complicated one. One of the hard facts about writing—regardless of its genre—is that it is difficult to making a steady living wage at it. Most book authors have some other job: journalist, academic, etcetera. Novelists are no different. A first time author might sell only 5,000 copies, which is better than your average academic monograph, but not that much better. It often takes several tries before a novelist has a commercially successful work. This is the “John Grisham effect” that Carpenter mentioned. It took two tries for Grisham, the author of legal thrillers, to become a best-seller. When The Firm (1991) started selling well, only then did A Time to Kill (1989) become popular. Michael Connelly, the mystery writer, did not become a best-seller until his fifth book The Poet (1996) appeared in print.

Most of the historians mentioned in this article have tenure-track positions and have turned to fiction as a sidelight to an academic career rather than as a substitute for one. In this case, Paretsky is the exception. She turned to fiction on a full-time basis. Even then, there are important qualifications in her story. Married to a University of Chicago physics professor, she knew she would not be able to find a history job in the Chicago area and went to business school, earning a MBA. She then worked at an insurance agency. “Insurance isn't anyone’s first choice for a career,” she remarked. She stayed there until she had three novels to her name. It was the $200,000 she received for selling the film rights to her V. I. Warshawski character that made it possible for her to leave the insurance company and focus on her writing. “It was foolish because I lost control of the character,” she says. “It was smart because it gave me the freedom to quit my job and become a full-time writer."

Connelly has made similar remarks about the financial windfall he received from selling the film rights to his books. Two of his books Bloodwork (1998) and The Lincoln Lawyer (2005) were turned into films of the same names. Those developments, however, came later in his writing career. He was a working journalist while writing his first four novels. “I sold Paramount the rights to Harry Bosch 18 years ago. I don't regret it. The deal I made allowed me to quit my job at the L.A. Times and be a full-time writer. But they never made a movie. We tried very hard. There were maybe six different scripts, but they just weren't Harry Bosch. So they put him on the shelf.”

Blog CIII (103): The History Ph.D. as Novelist

2011-11-30T08:13:00.002-05:00

Editorial Note: Today's posting is the second part of three that represents a return of the "The History Ph.D. as..." series. This essay examines historians who have moved into the world of fiction as novelists. The article is exceptionally long even by internet standards (roughly 4,000 words), so it will be posted on "In the Service of Clio" in three parts. Part one appeared in Blog CII on Monday, November 28, 2011 and part three will be out on Friday, December 2, 2011.

There are bigger concerns such as how well does a historian write fiction? “With difficulty,” Ian Mortimer, observed. Mortimer, who writes fiction under the pen name James Forrester, added, “Anyone with a PhD in history has spent at least seven years being told by university lecturers always to ‘err on the side of caution’ and to suspect all evidence for the past—to the extent that many academic books are more concerned with what we do not know than what we do. The idea of deliberately creating scenarios, events and characters that did not exist in reality is anathema. However, the biggest hurdle a historian has is persuading people that he or she can write a novel."

Mortimer notes correctly that there are good reasons for this skepticism. “Historians are mostly very poor writers. Nothing in a university education teaches us how to write history well, let alone do anything more imaginative. Most historians baulk at the thought because there is nothing firm for them to hold on to, nothing certain and therefore nothing indisputably true. We have to make a huge leap of faith to realise the ‘truth’ that makes historical fiction worthwhile is a deeper, more subtle truth than in history, concerned with the truths of life experience, not facts?”

Cobbs Hoffman agreed. “It’s very different,” she said. “You have to write better.” That requires more time to hone and polish prose. “You have to work harder at it.”

What issues does a writer face in trying to transition from one medium to the other? “Writing fiction was far harder than I could have imagined,” David stated, “and there were moments during the long and torturous edit process when it seemed that Zulu Hart, the first of the trilogy, would never be fit for public consumption.”

His editors told him to back away from historical, facts and narrative. That is a difficult thing for a historian to do. “Eventually I saw the sense of this. I wasn't being asked to sacrifice historical accuracy per se. Just to accept that a historical novel, or any novel for that matter, stands or falls on plot and characterisation; period detail is important, but only in so far as it gives a sense of authenticity. It must remain in the background and never be allowed to dominate the story.”

Does historical fiction do damage to our understanding of the past? That is a real issue that historians writing fiction must consider. “Historical fiction, as a result, often takes liberties with the ‘truth’: it compresses time, invents conversations and motives that real people never had, and generally tampers with the historical record for the purposes of plot.”

The real issue is how much. “The trick is to minimize those liberties, and to make sure that when you're writing about historical figures you “stay true to the spirit of that person,” George MacDonald Fraser, the novelist best known for his Flashman novels, reflected. Fraser is something of the reverse of most of the authors discussed here; he was a novelist/screenwriter who also did history.

The biggest issue in taking dramatic license is the use of fictional characters. Weir, for her part, wants to use her fiction to fill in gaps in the historical record and gain “insights that would not be permissible to a historian, and yet can have a legitimate value of their own.” As a result, she prefers to use real individuals as her main characters. “While I was researching my biography of Eleanor of Aquitaine,” she explained, “it occurred to me that I wanted to write a novel about Eleanor, in which I could develop ideas and themes that had no place in a history book, but which—based on sound research and educated guesses—could help to illuminate her life and explain her motives and actions.”

Martin agrees that historical fiction “fills in the spaces.” He disagrees, though, on the use of fictional characters. “Fictional characters have a freedom of movement in the story that gives you a freedom of movement.” If an author does not use fictional characters in a novel, then they might as well be writing history. “The fictional characters give me the plot,” he said. “That is what makes fiction, what happens to characters who move through history.”

At the same time, this fictionalizing of a real person’s life must be grounded in reality. “It is liberating to be able to use one’s imagination, but you can't simply indulge in flights of fancy,” Weir explained. “That sells short both those who know nothing of the subject, and those who know a great deal. I know—because my readers regularly, and forcefully, tell me so—that people care that the historical fiction they read is close to the truth.”

With these considerations in mind, an author still needs to do research to tell your story and get it right. “The research is the necessary spadework. Even when I was working on my doctorate I was writing poetry, the occasional magazine article. I'm more of a magpie researcher than someone who wants to live in it all the time,” Doig explained.

The knowledge a historian has of the past can be a useful in tool writing historical fiction. “Yet much of the research required for a historical novel is, I discovered, very different from that done for a history book,” David observed. “For Zulu Hart I already knew a lot of solid factual information because I'd previously written a history of the Zulu War. What I didn't have was the sights and smells. What, for example, did the inside of the War Office look like in 1879? Or what was the experience of steam travel from England to South Africa at that time?”

Harkness agrees: “As a historian you can only go as far as the evidence will take you. I needed to be able to shed that, to let the history serve the story rather than have the history bind the story. You have to rewire your brain, in a way.” She, however, chose to use her knowledge of the past to examine how it affects the present. At the center of her story is Ashmole 782, a long lost medieval document that may or may not contain the secrets of eternal life. “It really exists,” she said. The document was one of many manuscripts that Elias Ashmole, a 17th century bibliophile, collected and cataloged. “It really is lost—I've looked for it; that's its real title. This is the perfect jumping-off point for a novel. I can either be frustrated as a historian or intrigued as a storyteller.”

Blog CII (102): The History Ph.D. as Novelist

2011-11-28T09:54:00.002-05:00

Editorial Note: Today's posting is the first part of three essays that represents a return of the "The History Ph.D. as..." series. This essay examines historians who have moved into the world of fiction as novelists. The article is exceptionally long even by internet standards (roughly 4,000 words), so it will be posted on "In the Service of Clio" in three parts. Part two appeared in Blog CIII on Wednesday, November 30, 2011 and part three will be out on Friday, December 2, 2011.

Writing and research abilities are two skills that a historian acquires in the process of getting a Ph.D. Both of these abilities can be transferred to the work of writing fiction. Believe it or not there is a long tradition of historians and other scholars writing novels instead of or in addition to scholarly studies. “English-speaking anthropologists have been writing fiction ever since anthropology began in the late 19th century,” Nancy Schmidt, an anthropologist and head of Harvard's Tozzer Library, remarked.

Historical fiction has also enjoyed recent popularity in the publishing world. Ivan Doig, who earned a Ph.D. in western history from the University of Washington and has published academically, has made more of a name for himself as a novelist, was asked about historical fiction: “I hope it's a great wave I'm caught up in. I don't think of myself as a writer of historical fiction. There are historical laws of gravity in historical fiction; big things are happening in the world, and my characters are affected by those."

Why is historical fiction currently so popular? Saul David, a British military historian and a professor at the University of Buckingham turned novelist, attributes the popularity of historians writing fiction to the success of another British historian, Alison Weir. Already one of the best selling historians in the United Kingdom, Weir’s historical novel, Innocent Traitor (2006), which is about Lady Jane Grey, became a best seller. Despite her Ph.D. from the University of Edinburgh, Philippa Gregory is an established novelist of the Tudor and Stuart periods. She believes her readers don’t read novels such as The White Queen (2009) “as history.” Instead she believes they consider it a work about “a woman speaking from the urgency of the novel.” According to historian Simon Sebag Montefiore, who has also written a novel Sashenka (2008), “Real stories—whether in pure fiction or historical—have a certain indefinable power; we are endlessly curious about the past and hungry for learning that we hope will illuminate the present.” Journalist turned historian turned novelist Barrett Tillman put it simply when he said, “History drives the story."

Other historians agree with this assessment. “I learned history through historical novels,” Elizabeth Cobbs Hoffman, the Dwight Stanford Professor at San Diego State University, said. A historian, she is also the author of a novel, Broken Promises (2011) about the U.S. Civil War, Works of fiction are what first got her interested in becoming a historian. David had a similar experience. He was in his early teens “when I read my first Flashman novel and it's no coincidence that most of my history books are about the same Victorian wars."

Why do historians turn to fiction? “Every historian is a romantic,” Stan Carpenter, a history Ph.D. teaching at the U.S. Naval War College as a professor of strategy, remarked. Carpenter is also the author of Resurrection of Antimony (2009), a historical novel set in World War II. “Every historian has thought about living in the time period they studied. Writing novels “allows you to roam in that sphere of our own historical fantasy.” William Martin, the novelist, agrees: “I liked living in those worlds myself.”

There is also a good deal of overlap between historian and novelist. “The greatest historians working today—as has always been the case—are the ones that tell you a story,” Martin explained. He is the reverse of Cobbs Hoffman. He learned history as a work-study student at Harvard, assisting visiting scholars associated with the history department. In addition to being a novelist who has written mystery novels and historical fiction, he wrote the screenplay for the documentary George Washington: The Man Who Wouldn't Be King, which was an episode in the PBS series “The American Experience.” Work on this documentary eventually lead to his novel Citizen Washington. Deborah Harkness, an associate professor of history of science at the University of Southern California, who has also written a novel, A Discovery of Witches (2011), set in contemporary England with witches, vampires, and demons, agrees. “I'm a storyteller,” she told the Los Angeles Times. “And I have really good material to work with: I've been studying magic and the occult since about 1983.”

British historian and novelist Jason Goodwin had a different reaction to fiction. “When I went to Long Kesh [a prison in Northern Ireland where he was incarcerated], I was persuaded to stop reading fiction by a friend who dismissed it all as sort of bourgeois nonsense. For 10 years I didn't go near fiction. I just concentrated on history and politics. When I was finishing my Ph.D., I started to read fiction again. It was like falling in love again. A very intense experience."

There are skeptics, though. The British historian Tristram Hunt, who teaches at Queen Mary, University of London and is a Member of Parliament, told The Times that he had a number of colleagues who had taken up fiction because it sold comparatively well. “There is a dangerous tendency among historians to slide into historical fiction, which must be avoided at all costs,” he said.

Hunt has a point. His worry is one that stems from the concern that many historians had a few years back about literary theorists who argued that history is a construction, that history is nothing more than a story that individuals tell about the past. This idea, although silly when considered in full, attacked the very foundation of history, and its integrity as a discipline. If history is nothing more than another form of fiction, why bother? In 1990 Sir Geoffrey Elton described postmodern literary theory as “the intellectual equivalent of crack.” The following year, historian Gordon Wood warned that historians might soon “put themselves out of business” if they went down this path. In 2005 Donald Kagan, in his Jefferson lecture, “In Defense of History,” warned about the perils of “pseudo-philosophical mumbo-jumbo.” The British historian of early modern Britain, Lawrence Stone dismissed the literary theorists, noting, “The novelist is free to create events. Imagination does play a very important part in the writing of history but there is a reality principle out there."

These concerns are ones that individual historian need to consider when writing historical fiction. Writers, be they historians or novelists, develop something of a name brand. Sara Paretsky, a University of Chicago Ph.D., solved this problem by writing in a venue that has nothing to do with the field of antebellum New England. She has written a series of mystery novels set in contemporary Chicago featuring her main character, V. I. Warshawski.

For most historians turned novelists, this issue appears to be a small one. Cobbs Hoffman rejected the idea of using a pen name when she wrote Broken Promises (2011). She figured that she might “gain some capital” with her readers as a historian. Tillman took the same view. He already had a name from non-fiction books he had written and that was a major asset in selling books.

Blog CI (101): The Plan C Debate

2011-11-18T12:35:00.003-05:00

The Grafton/Grossman vs. Lemisch debate was interesting, but not that instructive. Lemisch has a point that the AHA has not done enough, but his specific ideas are not feasible and vastly exceed the resources of the history profession. Grafton and Grossman have as a follow up to their Plan B article published another article in Perspectives on History entitled, "Plan C." It is a clever title, but the main thrust of the article is to emphasize a second time the arguments they made in their “Plan B” article. The two certainly realize that the history business has some serious problems and they want to be constructive in finding solutions, like offering more sessions at the AHA annual conference on career management issues and using the AHA website to make the profession “less hierarchal.”

They also make it clear in this article that the AHA will not be taking the lead, which only underscores Lemisch’s complaints about the organization. They argue that solutions to the job crisis need to come from history departments that produce Ph.D.s. They advocated a program similar to the one I suggested in Blog XCVI, but they also make it clear that good projects like these must be the responsibility of individual institutions.

What are we to make of those positions? I understand their view and it is legitimate—the AHA is an umbrella organization and can hardly order the history department at Stanford (or at any other school) to do something—but they are arguing for their limitations. With that attitude, there is no doubt that those limits will sure enough be theirs and that of the entire organization. I also found much of the essay vague. What specifically do they want to see happen? Details are absent. Finally, I am a little disturbed with an important implication of this essay. They have basically written off those scholars that have already finished their Ph.D.s and graduated. They are talking about making changes to shape the future, but very little about helping some of the most vulnerable members of the AHA.

With those points made, there is still a lot that the Association can do even within the existing power structure of the history profession. My suggestions are listed below. Some of them are issues I have discussed before, but many are new:

1) Sponsor a Conference on What the AHA Can Do: Make this a weekend, non-academic conference. Invite roughly 30-40 historians (much more and it becomes counterproductive) who have been taking the lead on job market issues. Make the mission of this conference one of brainstorming and idea generation on concrete initiatives that the organization can take to solve the problem. Maybe the answer is very little, but some outside perspectives might also generate new ideas that no one in the leadership had considered.

2) Sponsor a Conference on What Departments Can Do: There is no anti-trust laws applying to departments talking to one another and trying to initiate similar programs that can move the profession in certain directions. This type of meeting will help a number of university officials across the country from having to reinvent the wheel over and over again Like the first proposal, kake this a weekend, non-academic conference. Invite roughly 20-30 historians from leading departments who can speak for their home institutions and are deeply involved with graduate student education. (Department chairs and directors of graduate education are probably the best type of people rather than distinguished, award-winning star of the department). Make the mission of this conference one of brainstorming and idea generation on concrete initiatives on what departments can do.

3) Subsidized Membership for Applied Historians: Grafton and Grossman made it clear they want to broaden the membership of the AHA as a way of expanding the career paths open to history Ph.D.s. The term “public history” is often used to describe these positions, but that is a misleading phrase and describes some very different activities that have little to do with the public sphere. I prefer the term “applied history.” The people that study the past other than academic historians include: archeologists, political scientists, librarians, archivists, journalists, documentary filmmakers, historical preservationists, professional writers, museum curators, and editors. There are a number of sub-divisions within those categories. Many of these people doing this type of work often hold a Ph.D. in history; many do not and do not need one. For example, a degree in architecture might be more useful for a historic preservationist than one in history. Many of these professions have their own professional associations that already attract the attention, time and money of people working in these fields. If the AHA wants to broaden its base, it needs to make membership in the American Historical Association attractive to these individuals and one way to do that is to make it very cheap for a several years until an awareness of the AHA and what it can do seeps into other fields.

4) Create Two New Divisions: The first should be for school teachers. This division can offer important advice to AHA members that want to go into this field of teaching on the requirements for getting teaching jobs that usually vary from state to state. It can also offer summer workshops that help keep school teachers well versed in history. The second should be for “applied history,” which is to say scholars in other academic fields that are often housed in different departments and colleges and usually require specialized skills (like fine art; legal; medical; and mathematical historians) and people that are doing history out in the public sphere. This division should develop programming that helps bridge the divide between history and other academic disciplines.

5) Discount Advertising: The AHA should offer steep discounts to organizations other than history departments wanting to put job announcements in Perspectives. These organizations would be institutions like archeology departments, public history firms, state agencies that do historic preservation, etc. By steep discount, I mean $1 for a certain word length, and $2 for a larger size. The idea behind this suggestion is that the AHA has to make itself an asset for organizations other than history departments, if it is truly going to be an inclusive to all career types studying the past. At the moment, other professions have done pretty well without much interface with the AHA. It is quite easy for people to advertise on H-Net and not bother with the AHA newsletter. A discount for these institutions is a loss-leader for the organization. The AHA might lose money in the short run from this advertising, but by making more services available to members, it makes membership far more rewarding and useful and will maintain and even increase the numbers of people that join the AHA.

6) Add Other Fields to the AHA Presidency Rotation: The AHA had several presidents who came from other closely related fields like political scientists, library science, and archeology. Some like Alfred Thayer Mahan and Theodore Roosevelt did not even have Ph.D.s. Since the end of World War II, the AHA has been dominated by Ph.D.s in history departments. It is time for the AHA to begin making efforts to bring others into the organization. Broadening the leadership of the AHA, the flagship organization in the history business, is the first step in expanding the organization’s knowledge of other professional career paths where the history Ph.D. can find gainful employment and make a contribution to our understanding of the past.

7) Develop an AHA Alternative Career Speaker Series: Most AHA members have gone from grad school to professional employment as professors and often do not have good ideas or contacts in other fields that can help their students. Many historians have had to do a lot of trailblazing on their own that the rest of the profession does not appreciate. Why reinvent the wheel again? A speakers series that the AHA sponsors can make these experiences better known to the professorate ranks and will enhance the personal and professional reputation of these “applied” or “public” historians. It is a good way to get the conversation started that Grafton and Grossman want to see take place. These communities are not talking to one another and the AHA needs to take the lead in initiating these conversations.

8) Develop Conversion Programs: The AHA should invite a number of these “applied historians” to a series of small, weekend workshops or conferences designed to explain the skills that a new historian will need to find work in one of these fields. While a Ph.D. in history often bolsters the credentials of an applied historian, the degree often does not make one qualified to do this type of work. This was a point that a number of public historians made in Blog XLVI. Put another way, the degree is not a two way street, and the AHA needs to help their junior members find ways to use the assets the degree does bring.

So, how does a history Ph.D. trained to become a professor convert to working in another field? To answer that question some of the issues this type of program needs to address include: Will newly minted history Ph.D.s need another degree? A masters in library science is usually mandatory for most librarian positions; on the other hand, a historic preservationist might only require a certain number of courses in architecture. What other type of criteria are required? Clippings from magazines, newspapers, and websites are often crucial for people wanting to enter journalism. Articles and book reviews in academic journals are never really appropriate. Are internships important? In documentary filmmaking, this often the case. Where do you go to find these jobs? These type of jobs are rarely advertised in the AHA newsletter and there are specialized websites that list historic preservation jobs, museum positions, etc. What organizations should one join and which conferences should a budding scholar attend? Just as if you were a military historian, you would want to join the Society for Military History in addition to the AHA, there are professional museum organizations that one might want to join if you want to be a curator.

The product of these small workshops can come in several formats: a series of AHA published pamphlets that can be offered on the organization’s website: “The History Ph.D. as Documentary Filmmaker,” etc.; a series of sessions at the AHA annual meeting; template or syllabi for programs that history departments can use to convert their Ph.D.s into these career paths, or an AHA speaker series on alternative careers.

Blog C (100): The Plan B Debate: Counterargument and Rebutal

2011-11-16T15:02:00.001-05:00

The same day that the History News Network published Response to Jesse Lemisch's essay "History is Worth Fighting For, But Where is the AHA?", they also published a counterargment from Anthony Grafton and Jim Grossman entitled: "Response to Jesse Lemisch: It's Not Enough to Just Wish for Change." That essay was a counterargument to Lemisch's original essay. In it the mention their Plan C article, which is not what Lemisch was responding to when he wrote his original essay. (I will have more discussion on that essay in a new posting). The HNN then ran a rebutal from Lemisch. Both are published in this posting:

Professor Jesse Lemisch has raised important and thoughtful objections to our recent essay, “No More Plan B: A Very Modest Proposal for Graduate Programs in History,” and we assume he would offer a similarly trenchant critique of our follow-up column, “Plan C.” The essence of his argument rests here:
What they propose is indeed too modest, almost tragically so. What we need is not cutbacks and accommodations but rather vastly expanded funding for higher education, plus a program for historians like the New Deal Federal Writers’ Project. . . . [Grossman and Grafton] . . . accepted as a given the collapse of public support for the public good, and they seek to accommodate to it. What’s lost in this is the high value that we place on history and a complex that connects history to civilization itself. History is worth fighting for, and its importance goes far beyond the current vogue for saleable skills and narrow vocational justifications for education.
As historians who are accustomed to writing narrative, we will take the liberty of abandoning our normal style, in the interest of brevity, since as usual Professor Lemisch’s points are clear and straightforward:

1) We have not advocated cutbacks.

2) “Accommodation” is a slippery term. It can mean accepting an unacceptable status quo; it also can mean advocating change while working within an existing framework to accomplish things that ought to be accomplished. Yes, we need vastly expanded funding for higher education. AHA advocates for such funding where it has leverage. Yes, the first “Obama stimulus” should have included money to the NEH for projects to employ humanists (more realistic than “a program for historians like” FWP). Many of us pushed for such a program. But it didn’t happen and now we are here.

3) But the reality is what it is, at least in the near future: for decades colleges and universities have not offered enough tenure track positions to provide work for more than two-thirds of those who take doctorates in history, and now they are offering fewer of them than they did two or three years ago. Our choice—which is not new—is to train fewer historians or to find a more diverse array of employment opportunities. Like many AHA members, we as individuals wish the occupiers Godspeed, but as officers of a membership association, we also have a duty to serve the needs of the many members of our profession who need jobs now and will need them in the next several years.

4) Like Professor Lemisch we insist on the “high value that we place on history and a complex that connects history to civilization itself.” This is why we disagree with his assumption that broadening employment opportunities for historians is somehow wrong. History should be part of public discourse, and historians should produce some of that discourse. They can do this if they find employment across a wide variety of institutional environments, including government and business. Trained historians bring to their work a set of professional ethics, we hope, rooted in the AHA’s Statement on Standards of Professional Conduct, which emphasizes the importance of evidence, civil and open debate, and freedom of inquiry. We want the values and insights of historians to work their way into every corner of American public life. To increase our influence, we must broaden our perspective on employment.

Here is the rebuttal from Lemisch that the HNN ran:

I’m glad that Anthony Grafton and Jim Grossman support a break with the hierarchalism that has marked our profession’s view of non-academic employment, and I wish that the AHA, together with other professional organizations, would really get behind a new WPA. But once again Grafton and Grossman invoke “reality” to justify their accommodation to cutbacks in higher education and in history, at a time when the national and international mood is, “enough is enough!” Their goal is limited "to train[ing] fewer historians or to find[ing] a more diverse array of employment opportunities…"

Finding that the profession is cruelly preparing graduate students for jobs that do not exist, Grafton and Grossman propose to solve the problem by preparing graduate students for other jobs that also, unhappily, do not exist! This (as we say in New York) is reality? Indeed, in their “Plan C" in November's edition of Perspectives, they cite William and Mary College’s apprenticeships in archival and museum management which, according to James Axtell “have disappeared for budgetary reasons.” Not only can the College not support them, but, those of us who are indeed concerned with reality must ask which archive and which museum has the money to hire such people amidst the general collapse? How can you advocate “public history” in the absence of public funding? Reality, indeed.

Like many, I avidly leaf through the AHA program as soon as it arrives, mark it up, and fold back pages. In the content of papers to be presented at the Chicago meeting, I see a thriving historical enterprise (as they used to call it). But I see no sense of crisis. That crisis is the reality that we must face, and I see precious little evidence that this has dawned on the AHA. Grafton and Grossman want to limit the AHA’s activities to “working within an existing framework” and functioning as a “clearinghouse.” I live a couple of miles north of Zuccotti Park. More and more people, here and around the world are finding that a sense of reality dictates that we refuse to work within the diseased existing frameworks and refuse to simply adjust, as Grossman and Grafton advocate, to shrinking budgets. Enough of this deck-chair stuff while the historical enterprise steams ahead towards the iceberg.

Blog XCIX (99): The Plan B Debate Again

2011-11-15T12:32:00.000-05:00

Jesse Lemisch, a Professor Emeritus of History at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice of the City University of New York, disagreed with the "Plan B" essay that Anthony T. Grafton and Jim Grossman wrote. Lemisch is the author of On Active Service in War and Peace: Politics and Ideology in the American Historical Profession, and wrote the following essay entitled: "History is Worth Fighting For, But Where is the AHA?" It appered on the History News Network on November 7, 2011:

Liberals in the Obama era are accommodating to the unacceptable and turning their backs on traditional liberal values. Once again, the job of defending those values is left to radicals. Now history itself needs defense.

Anthony T. Grafton and Jim Grossman, respectively president and executive director of the American Historical Association, offer “No More Plan B: A Very Modest Proposal for Graduate Programs in History” in the October 2011 issue of Perspectives on History. What they propose is indeed too modest, almost tragically so. What we need is not cutbacks and accommodations but rather vastly expanded funding for higher education, plus a program for historians like the New Deal Federal Writers’ Project, which produced so much of value, including the the slave narrative collection and the 48 volumes of the American Guide Series to the states.

But listen to Grafton and Grossman. They outline the continuing grim employment situation for historians, and present it as almost God-given, beyond human control:
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 to expand… It’s not likely to change for the better, unless someone figures out how to work magic on the university budgets… it’s unrealistic...
I hesitate to use so snarky a term as C. Wright Mills’s “crackpot realism,” but I find myself at odds with what Grafton and Grossman take to be realism. With the best of intentions, these AHA officers have nonetheless accepted as a given the collapse of public support for the public good, and they seek to accommodate to it. What’s lost in this is the high value that we place on history and a complex that connects history to civilization itself. History is worth fighting for, and its importance goes far beyond the current vogue for saleable skills and narrow vocational justifications for education.

Grafton and Grossman are certainly not in the same boat as the worst of the right-wing critics of higher education (like Florida governor Rick Scott, who says “We don’t need a lot more anthropologists in the state"). Nor, I think, would they agree with the kinds of anti-tenure retrenchment arguments offered by Andrew Hacker and Claudia Dreifus (I wrote about this subject for Truthout). But what these critics from various points on the ideological spectrum have in common is an acceptance of things as they are, a failure of vision, and an unwillingness to embark on a battle to defend learning and what used to be called “liberal education."

As I write this, some five miles to the south of me on Manhattan Island people are in the streets trying to change, not accept, the current economic catastrophe, greed and increasing inequality. Their slogan might be, “Expand, Don’t Contract.” The day’s email brings a draft of a demand to be debated by Occupy Wall Street : “Jobs for all—a Massive Public Works and Public Service Program.” It appears that those druggies, drummers, sex addicts and student debtors down there in Zuccotti Square are doing more for civilization, history and education than is the AHA. It’s time for the AHA to catch up with them, and start fighting for history.

Blog XCVIII (98): The Plan B Debate Continues

2011-11-14T11:03:00.000-05:00

While I was writing my next essay for the blog, the "Plan B" debate exploded with several postings on the internet, which ultimately resulted in a response from Grafton and Grossman. I was planning to just provide links to these essays, but to make it a little easier to follow the debate, I will provide my own posting this week. Think of these reproductions as an added bonus. The first is an editorial from Scott Jaschik entitled "More Options for History Ph.D.s." This essay appeared in Inside Higher Ed on October 31, 2011:

Last month, the president and executive director of the American Historical Association issued a call for their discipline to move away from the idea that Ph.D. training is primarily about producing the next generation of professors. They called for history departments to stop talking about non-academic careers as "alternative," and to instead see them as truly equal options -- and as options that should help shape the nature of doctoral education.

Their call was called "No More Plan B," as a counter to the idea that academic careers are necessarily Plan A. Today they are releasing a follow-up -- "Plan C" -- in which they provide more specific ideas about the kinds of changes history departments might consider for their Ph.D. programs.

Here are some of the ideas shared in the new piece by Anthony Grafton, a Princeton University historian who is president of the AHA, and James Grossman, executive director of the association:
Make public history a full part of the doctoral Ph.D. curriculum. Grafton and Grossman note that some history departments have embraced public history, and have become known for preparing graduate students for careers at museums, historical sites, government agencies and elsewhere. Despite the success of these programs, Grafton and Grossman write that "many of the largest departments have yet to embrace the legitimacy of public history as an aspect (not a track) of Ph.D. instruction." Right now, public history remains "a separate track," they write, and that status limits its ability to reach more students, and to provide an opportunity for them to find meaningful work with their doctorates.

Challenge the bias of mentors. Faculty members who advise graduate students, Grossman and Grafton write, still see traditional research-oriented academic careers as the ultimate goal of a Ph.D., and this attitude should change. "The result of this short-sightedness is not only to narrow students' options, but also to make it difficult to see or follow the pathways blazed by those historians who have moved in different and promising directions."

Create new graduate courses through alliances with other departments. Some of the skills that would enable history graduate students to have more career options aren't history-specific, and might be provided to doctoral students in a range of disciplines, Grafton and Grossman write. They suggest that courses in digital technologies and their use with scholarship would be the kind of offering that might be added. Another possibility might be courses on finance and management for Ph.D. humanities students.
While the new essay pledges that the AHA will strive to publicize non-academic career options, and will highlight such choices at its meetings, the authors stress that most of the needed changes will come on campuses. And the authors write that they believe it is possible for historians to continue to uphold the standards of their field, even as they reconsider career paths and the most important skills for Ph.D.s to have.

"Look around and, like it or not, you see a world of new jobs that demand new skills," write Grafton and Grossman. "Most of us believe that the kinds of learning we have cultivated and pass on to our students still matter, and most of us are still trying to do the kind of teaching we love in the teeth of reformers who want to cut costs by turning our lectures into YouTube videos and fixing us permanently at our computers to answer the queries of our viewing audience (formerly known as students).

"This persistence -- which is not mere Luddism -- is as it should be. Standards matter. But there's no sense pretending that the new world isn't out there. Some of those currently taking doctorates in history will carry on this project, changing the academy as has each preceding generation. But many others will have to blaze new trails, finding ways to remain committed to history, and to practice it, in venues that are not listed by most departments in their placement claims."

Blog XCVII (97): The Departmental Response to the Plan B Debate

2011-11-02T14:01:00.000-04:00

In Blog XCVI, I addressed the Plan B debate that Anthony Grafton, the President of the American Historical Association and Jim Grossman, the executive director of the AHA, initiated. In my contribution to this discussion I argued that the organization is not as weak as it thinks it is when it comes to responding to the job crisis in the history profession. There are things that the AHA can do to change the employment situation. Now, it is time to turn our attention to individual history departments.

What can they do to change employment patterns? The answer is again a lot more than they think. The faculty in departments of history have a lot of influence on the Ph.D. glut. One solution that many people writing higher education newspaper columns and blogs have suggested is that these programs stop admitting students that they know will never find academic employment once they finish their Ph.D. That would indeed solve the problem, but it runs against the institutional interests of the departments. They need and want grad students. These junior scholars are necessary for the operation of large lecture classes that tenure track faculty teach and they can also be used as instructors of record to make up the difference between the tenured faculty’s work loads and the teaching obligations of a department to meet degree requirements.

So that idea is a non-starter, but there are several other things that a department can and probably should do if it continues to admit students that will not find academic careers. These suggestions will help students, but increasing the viable career options for Ph.D.s also services the institutional interest of history departments that want to maintain or increase graduate-student enrollments. I have four main proposals:

Develop an Alumni Speaker Series: bring recent graduates back to campus and have them give talks about their careers. They can provide useful information about a number of issues: where did they find job ads? What did they learn about the application process that they did not know before? What issues (expected and unexpected) did they face once they started the job? How well did their training prepare them for their new positions? What would they do different if they had it to do over again? What are they glad that they did? This type of program is good feedback for the faculty, but it can also be an inspiration for currently enrolled students. It helps to let them know what others that have been where they are now have been able to do with the degree they are earning. In Blog XV I said that alumni networking was an important consideration that historians need to do more of; this is one of the reasons why and a way to do it.
Develop a Non-Academic Career Speaker Series: bring historians to campus that are doing something other than teaching in a history department. These speakers do not have to be alumni of your school. The fact of the matter is that the majority of people in history Ph.D. programs are going to be doing something other than becoming an assistant professor of history after they graduate. History faculty need to start preparing their students for non-academic careers and that will be difficult for individuals who went from grad school to faculty positions. There is no reason to have them reinvent the wheel. Have people who have already done trailblazing work in finding non-academic utility for their degrees explain those efforts. They can answer important questions like: What can I do with a history Ph.D.? Where did they find job ads? Is it possible for me to do research, publish, or teach in this type of job? Can I move into a tenure-track position later if I do something else for the time being?
Profile These Guest Speakers: departmental web sites and newsletters are great forums for biographical portraits or question and answer sessions with these historians. Developing a sense of community among the alumni is also important. This type of published product bolsters the reputation of a department as an institution, which is something different than the individual publishing efforts of their faculty members. This effort can have untold second and third order effects: enhancing the reputation of the department as a place to study for students because it makes real, creative efforts to help their students find jobs; it also makes a department look creative, which is always a good environment that makesit easier to recruit new faculty.
Develop the Resources of the Career Office: Each university has a placement office(s). These centers are usually designed for undergraduates, but graduate students in history would be within their rights to ask that they develop programs to help them pursue employment opportunities in which they can use the skills they developed in their Ph.D. studies. These programs would include workshops that will help students decide what career paths are available to them; that conduct practice job interviews; and explain the nuances of writing a impressive resumes.

In closing, I should note that if any of these ideas sound good and are things that your home institutions are not offering, you should ask the department, college, or university that it begin to do so. It is an entirely reasonable request. Part of a faculty member’s job description is to help prepare their students for using their Ph.D. after they graduate.

Blog XCVI (96): The Plan B Debate

2011-10-28T13:27:00.002-04:00

The president of the American Historical Association, Anthony T. Grafton, and the executive director of the organization, Jim Grossman, published an article in the October 2011 issue of the AHA newsletter, Perspectives on History that has generated a lot of discussion. Before providing my views, I will try to hit the main highlights and have provided links to all the essays so individuals can read them in full, if they wish.

The article in question is entitled: “No More Plan B: A Very Modest Proposal for Graduate Programs in History." It was the feature of the front page of Perspectives. Grafton and Grossman have made an effort to address one of the biggest issues facing the history profession—the vast underemployment or unemployment of history Ph.D.s. In an interview after its publication, Grossman explained, “We're trying to say, 'Wake up. Times have changed. There are more opportunities and that's a good thing.’” He continued, "This is not about the negativity of wringing our hands and saying that there are no more jobs."

In short, the two are tired of non-academic careers for the history Ph.D. being seen as a lesser alternative to a tenure track position. The core of their argument is:

If we tell new students that a history PhD opens many doors, we need to broaden the curriculum to ensure that we're telling the truth. If the policy arena offers opportunities, and we think it does, then interested students need some space (and encouragement) to take courses in statistics, economics, or public policy. Accounting, acting, graphic design, advanced language training: students thinking at once creatively and pragmatically have all sorts of options at our research universities. And of course there's the whole exploding realm of digital history and humanities, and the range of skills required to practice them.

They add a bit later:

Instead of cutting down the dissertation, departments need to find ways of keeping dissertation writers attuned to the full range of opportunities that their work opens. Why not incorporate preparation for the future into the later years of doctoral training? This might be the time for an additional course or two, adventures into new realms of knowledge that build skills for diverse careers. That such diversification offers an antidote to melancholy and writer's block is merely a bonus, even more so if these explorations can also add texture or new insights to a dissertation. Departments might also consider workshops that explore the world of work, bring in speakers from government and other areas where many historians find jobs, and mobilize their networks of contacts as advisers for their students. Internships could provide even deeper experience, although care would have to be taken to integrate them into dissertation writing calendars.

A lot of discussion, some good, some not has followed. The essay was the subject of a news story in Inside Higher Ed, and it was reprinted in The Chronicle of Higher Education. On the AHA website, Margaret E. DeLacy, made the astute observation that the proof is in actions not words:

If the AHA wants history graduates to feel good about moving into other livelihoods and to go on using the skills they honed in graduate school, it should help them continue to think about history after they have done so. As a long-time member of the National Coalition of Independent Scholars (NCIS.org) and editor of H-Scholar, I have found the AHA to be much less supportive than other learned organizations such as the MLA and the ACLS. For example, the AHA used to have a prize for independent scholars, the Feis award, but it was pulled and re-defined as an award for public history. "Unequivocal support" means actual support, not just rhetoric.

In response, Dan Allosso posted the essay “No More Plan B”—Apocalypse or Opportunity?” on The Historical Society blog. His response was more philosophical than practical. Robin Maitzen responded on her blog. In “More Ph.D. Puzzlement.” She stated that the purpose of a history Ph.D. program is to train people to become historians. The students enrolling in those programs want to be historians. “In the 20+ years I have now been involved in graduate education, the strongest trend I’ve seen is towards academic ‘professionalization,’ with workshops on everything from conference proposals to fellowship applications to academic job interviews, and ever-rising pressure to publish, attend conferences, and participate in professional groups and activities.” If they wanted something else, they would be taking courses in another field. She also made an astute point. “When I read the AHA statement, I felt, no doubt cynically, that there is an elided step in the logic, a step where they say ‘we want to keep Ph.D. enrolments up.’"

Michael Ruse, who directs the program in history and philosophy of science at Florida State University, wrote in his blog for The Chronicle of Higher Education that historians need to start rethinking the requirements for the Ph.D. degree. He said a dissertation should no longer be an unpublished book. “A massive, traditional, history-style dissertation is the last thing they need. Get them used to writing shorter pieces that are going to be criticized and revised again and again."

Okay, that is the debate. What is my response to all of this? Well, to their credit, I think Grafton and Grossman have addressed the most important issue affecting the history profession today. That is an important start, and to be honest it is an issue that the leadership of the profession (AHA officers and the faculty at “leading” departments) have basically ignored. I hope they will build on what they have started. There is a lot more that can be done. The Grafton/Grossman article was short on specifics. It read a lot like: “buy low, sell high.” We need more and I would like to see the AHA take concrete steps in helping its newer members prepare for a careers doing something other than teaching in a history department.

That is easy to say, but much more difficult to do mainly because most of the leadership of the profession has had little experience using their degrees in anything other than an academic setting. They have gone from grad school to the faculty. Very few have had any other type of career.

So, what can the AHA do? I have a few ideas. First, the AHA needs to make efforts to broaden its leadership. The simple fact is that more people study the past professionally than those that reside in history departments. Sometimes they are economic or business historians with appointments in a department of economics or a college of business administration; others are anthropologists or archeologists. Prior to 1945 the AHA had several presidents who came from other closely related fields like political science, library science, archeology. Some like Alfred Thayer Mahan and Theodore Roosevelt did not even have Ph.D.s. Since the end of World War II, the AHA has been dominated by Ph.D.s in history departments. It is time for the AHA to begin making efforts to bring others into the organization, such as anthropologists, public historians, archeologists, documentary filmmakers, archivists, historical editors, museum curators, K-12 school teachers and professional writers.

The AHA should reach out to these other fields in two ways. First, it should create a new division for school teachers, and another for other fields. This division can offer important advice to AHA members that want to go into this field of teaching on the various requirements for getting teaching jobs in the various states. It can also offer summer workshops that help keep school teachers well versed in history. Second, the organization should add a non-historian to the rotation for presidency of the AHA.

I foresee several objections to these suggestions. One is that although the individuals in these other fields might use or contribute to history, they do not alter or shape in fundamental fashion our understanding of history the way academically trained historians do. Another and far more significant reservation is that bureaucratic reform does nothing to alter the job market and help reduce the surplus of unemployed historians.

Effective rebuttal to both of these criticisms is easy to make. The first point is simply not true. Individuals working in other fields often have a much bigger impact on history than the historian in a history department. Consider the audience of a documentary filmmaker or the number of people that museums enjoy. These are easily in the millions. Academic books never even get close to having that same readership. The editors working on The Papers of Thomas Jefferson are going to have a far more enduring impact on historical understanding than the author of a monograph no matter how insightful or innovative. To the second point about these proposals doing little to the job market, my response is short: you are absolutely correct—in the short term. The long-term is a different matter. Broadening the leadership of the AHA, the flagship organization in the history business, is the first step in broadening the organization’s knowledge of other professional career paths where the history Ph.D. can find gainful employment and make a contribution to our understanding of the past.

My second proposal is that the AHA run a summer workshop for newly minted history Ph.D.s designed to help them find alternative careers. To be effective, this type of program would be a multi-week, residential program that combines a mini-MBA course with some training in writing résumés and preparing for interviews. This summer institute should also help with networking and bring in corporate and not-for-profit recruiters to meet with the participants. History Ph.D.s are not normally what head-hunters are looking for but they often have very useful skills: language, writing, research, analysis that can used productively in any number of fields.

The objections to this type of program are understandable. Individuals went to graduate school because they wanted an academic career, not one in business. The AHA is also a scholarly organization, and job placement is outside of its mission. These issues represent some of the internal resistance to alternative careers that Grafton and Grossman were fighting. Responding to these objections is easy. For most people currently in graduate programs right now, a meaningful academic career is not realistic. The jobs simply do not exist. The statistics make that clear. The real option is between a non-academic career (or perhaps it is better describe as an alternative career) or none at all. Second, only the AHA is in a position to create such a program. Most colleges and universities have placement offices, which bring in recruiters, but those individuals are usually looking for a specific type of person and it is not a history Ph.D. These placement offices are not really going to do much to help the newly-minted Ph.D. There is an ethical impulse to helping other less fortunate Ph.D.s, but it is also in the institutional interest of those in the profession. As long as you have a mass of unemployed or underemployed individuals, they act as a weight keeping salaries down.

A third idea is that the AHA should offer steep discounts to organizations other than history departments wanting to put job announcements in Perspectives. These organizations would be institutions like archeology departments, public history firms, state agencies that do historic preservation, etc. By steep discount, I mean $1 for a certain word length, and $2 for a larger size. The idea behind this suggestion is that the AHA has to make itself an asset for organizations other than history departments, if it is truly going to be an inclusive to all career types studying the past, and so far, other professions have done pretty well without much interface with the AHA. As an institution, the Association needs to make it clear to other professions that it is a useful asset to them.

An obvious complaint is that this proposal discriminates against AHA member institutions. History departments have to pay more than other organizations because they are history departments. While this is true, the idea of increasing the job options that is put before individual AHA members is of greater importance to the profession as a whole and those history departments. The fact is, it looks bad for a history department to produced unemployed Ph.D.s. So, it is in a department’s interest to increase the employment opportunities for their graduates. Also, the AHA could make this a loss leader; offer low cost ads to non-history departments for a year or two and then charge them the regular cost.

Finally, leading departments need to begin…well…taking the lead in expanding or changing the curriculum. For the most part, I would suspect the best way to do this is to create “public history” or the-Ph.D.-as-“something”-programs; for example, journalists. I would bet that there will be a lot of resistance in these departments. (See Blog XLVI for a longer discussion on public history.) The history faculty at prestigious schools—I know that phrase is vague, so visit Blog LXXIX for a specific list—probably expect that their reputations will always trump the numbers. (“We’re Princeton, damn it! Our students are better and will always be able to get jobs.”) The problem is the numbers are the numbers and there is no getting around that fact. What will happen if more than one Princeton Ph.D. applies for the same job? (I was on a search committee and this very thing happened.) If the profession is going to change its attitude about non-academic employment, then schools like Princeton need to take the lead. It really is not that radical an attitude shift; there are plenty of non-academic jobs for economics Ph.D.s and those in political science. (I don’t mean to pick on Princeton—as a good USC Trojan I was using Stanford in the early drafts of this essay—but Grafton is from Princeton, and I figured it was fair to hold his school up for close examination.)

Okay, these are my ideas. I am offering them in an honest effort to follow up on the Grafton/Grossman article. If you have better suggestions on how to deal with the vast surplus of Ph.D.s I would love to hear them, and I suspect so would the AHA.

Blog XCV (95): Another View of the AHA

2011-10-18T20:36:00.000-04:00

Jason Knoll, teaches social studies at Verona Area High School in Verona, Wisconsin. I met him earlier this year when he asked me to speak to some of his students attending the American Historical Association meeting in Boston. No problem, A month later Knoll published "A High School Teacher at the Annual Meeting" in the February 2010 issue of Perspectives on History. I stumbled upon because he mentioned me in the article, but it is more interesting because of his take on the AHA annual meeting. I reproduce it for your information:

I’ve been a member of the AHA since my years as an undergraduate student, but I never went to an annual meeting until this year. What made my first trip to this massive gathering of historians even more memorable was the fact that I brought five of my AP European History students with me. The trip was an overall success: we sat in on five sessions, saw some of Boston, and walked away with a handful of books. I picked my students by holding an essay contest in my AP European History class. I estimated the cost of airfare and the hotel and had them talk to their parents before writing the essay. Once their parents gave their approval, 17 students wrote an essay arguing why I should take them with me. The only information that I gave them was the theme of the meeting and the web address of the AHA. I did not give them my rubric beforehand so that they would not merely write to the rubric. I scored them on three criteria—their passion for history, what interest they have for the theme, and why they would benefit from the trip. The five best essays were written by young women.

Once I gained approval from my school board, I had to determine which sessions we would attend. I had two objectives—they had to fit into our curriculum and they had to hold the interest of high school students for two hours (after all, what we as historians might find interesting may not necessarily be so for others). I narrowed the list of sessions to around 15, told them which ones I thought would be most beneficial to them, and then let them as a group decide on the specific choices.

Since my students’ typical view of a historian was that of professor, we attended the session on Thursday about the various other careers in history—archivist, preservationist, curator, instructor or historian for the military, and documentary editor. They walked away with a newfound interest in what they could do with a degree in history.

The highlight of our trip came on Friday morning when we attended the session about Carlos Eire’s latest work, A Very Brief History of Eternity. My students and I all read and discussed the book so that we could attend the session, understand the panelists, and even perhaps ask questions. Prior to our departure for Boston, I e-mailed Professor Eire about our plan and asked if he would do us the honor of having lunch with us after the session. Much to my surprise, he replied that he would be delighted to do so. My students were able to follow along with the first two panelists’ comments, although they (and I) struggled with the third panelist’s arguments dealing with space and time (I think). We lunched at Au Bon Pain (since we don’t have those here in Wisconsin), and proceeded to have a very pleasant conversation with Professor Eire. He was extremely personable and answered all of my students’ questions with humility and understanding.

We spent Friday afternoon walking the Freedom Trail and then returned to our hotel to get ready for the receptions. We first attended the reception hosted by the National History Center. It was fairly obvious that we were not the usual attendees for the annual meeting, but the historians at the reception were actually quite welcoming to my students. Two people in particular (that I saw, although there could have been others) were very interested in what my students thought about the meeting—James Banner of the NHC and Marian Barber (Univ. of Texas). Since all of my students were young women, I thought it would also be appropriate to attend the reception hosted by the Coordinating Council for Women in History. Sandra Dawson (NIU), the executive director, took some time to speak to my students about the role of the Council and the two co-sponsors, the Peace History Society and the Committee on LGBTQ History. We ended the night by moving to the reception hosted by the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations. One of the panelists from the session on careers in history, Nick Sarantakes (Naval War College), spent a considerable amount of time talking to my students about majoring in history and the uses of a history degree. He even gave them his card and told them that if they ever had any questions about history to e-mail him; this had a tremendous impact on my students.

Saturday was our busiest day, with three sessions and the screening of the film, The Conspirator. Our first session was about the public uses of history and the global war on terror. It was interesting to hear the various arguments made by the panelists. More importantly, however, I felt it was important for my students to hear the calls for historians to be more involved in public discourse and to understand how policymakers and government officials have misused history. The midday session covered the various issues and topics in teaching genocide. As a teacher, I found it useful, but again, I thought it was a good opportunity for my students to learn about the issues that teachers deal with when teaching. Finally, we attended the lecture on military history by Gerhard Weinberg about myths of the Second World War. Although the students were a bit exhausted mentally, they were still enthused about listening to one of the world’s eminent historians. We parted ways after the lecture, with the students going to the film screening, while I went to the reception hosted by the Conference Group for Central European History. The students thoroughly enjoyed the film. Additionally, at one point during the night they rode in the elevator with Florencia Mallon (Univ. of Wisconsin–Madison). She was extremely pleasant towards them and took an interest in their experiences at the meeting. My time at the reception proved to be a great time for networking, although as a high school teacher I felt a bit out of place. I ended up, however, having pleasant conversations with Francis Raška (Charles University, Czech Republic), Eric Weitz (Univ. of Minnesota), and Marion Berghahn (Berghahn Books).

On Sunday, we decided to skip the sessions and walk through the exhibit hall one last time. The vendors were nice to us, although I was surprised at how expensive some of the books were. I was, however, able to pick up some exam copies of books for a new course, The History of American Foreign Policy, as well as my AP European History class. Afterwards, we took a trip out to Harvard and rubbed the foot of John Harvard. I wanted to see the history department, but unfortunately, the doors to Robinson Hall were locked.

I definitely count the trip as an overwhelming success. But I did leave with an uneasy sense of a disconnect between secondary school teachers and “professional” historians. Some people seemed to be surprised that I was at the AHA. Is it that shocking for a high school teacher to be at an annual meeting of historians? Such perceptions will perhaps disappear if the AHA can do more to promote high school teachers as historians and encourage their participation in the annual meeting. Of course, this cannot be accomplished by the AHA alone. Colleges, universities, and even secondary school teachers themselves have to play significant and important—and collaborative—roles in such a movement.

However, a sign that such desirable changes are possible lies perhaps the fact that many historians treated my students and me with kindness and respect during our stay in Boston. I specially thank them. I plan on attending the annual meeting next year and hope to rekindle some of the conversations I began this year.

Administrative Post 14

2011-10-17T23:28:00.000-04:00

This post is to apologize for the long absence from the blog. I took a family vacation and have been on several research trips--I am actually on the road at the moment. I also in the last stages of turning in the manuscript for what will become my fifth book. Several new postings will follow this Fall, including a new entry in the "History Ph.D. as..." and some ideas on how the profession can deal with the surplus of Ph.D.s.

Blog XCIV (94): Good News of a Sort

2011-09-19T12:57:00.001-04:00

There is some good news out there about the job market…sort of. A new study conducted by the American Political Science Association reports that number of jobs in political science improved by 11 percent. The APSA study was an analysis of jobs advertised in the 2009-2010 academic year. (The APSA studies of the job market always report events after the first year of employment. Even better, there were more jobs than candidates. “It appears that despite economic difficulties, political science has not experienced the severe supply and demand problems that other disciplines, such as history face.” The most popular jobs are in sub-field of international relations. Until two years ago, the sub-field of American politics had more openings.

Now there are some qualifications that need to be made. First, only about sixty percent of Ph.D. granting departments in political science contributed to this study—so there could be a large mass of unaccounted for Ph.D. candidates. In fact, that is probable. If you are the chair of a department that produced eight Ph.D.s and none of them found a job, would you advertise that type of failure? Second, the study also includes non-academic jobs and it is a lot easier for political scientists to find jobs outside of academia than it is for historians. Finally, this study includes temporary positions and post docs. Only 49 percent of Ph.D. candidates found tenure track jobs and only half of that number—which is a confusing way of saying 25 percent—ended up a t research universities.

With all those qualifications in mind, these numbers suggest that some historians working in like minded sub-fields should consider building bridges to political science. What you do in graduate school, will determine what type of jobs you can apply for as a finished Ph.D. If you are a historian of fur trapping in the Canadian Rockies during the 1830s, then you are going to have little to do with political science, but if you are in training to become a diplomatic historian, then talking to the international relation types in the political science department is a bit easier. A smart, forward thinking graduate student should take enough graduate classes in political science to claim it as a field for their Ph.D. That will bear fruit later on if you decide you want to apply for a job in a political science department. Search committees will pay attention to transcripts to see if you have the credentials to teach the classes they need to be filled. More import is you dissertation topic. If you can develop a topic that address concerns in history but also political science, you are even more viable as a candidate. A group biography of the nuclear war strategists, people like Herman Kahn and Henry Kissinger, who dominated the field of international relations and security studies in the 1950s, might make a historian a strong candidate for a job in a history department, political science department, and even a public policy school. That is another something to think about when it comes to deciding your dissertation topic.

Finally, for those of you interested in reading the original: Jennifer Segal Diascro, "The Job Market and Placement in Political Science in 2009-2010," PS: Political Science and Politics vol. 4, no. 3 (July 2011), 597-603.

CXIII (93): The Death of Borders

2011-09-10T01:00:00.001-04:00

Borders Books is dead. I feasted off the dying carcass a lot, making four trips to stores in Rhode Island and Massachusetts. I bought a few titles for myself and then the frenzy started and I was buying birthday and Christmas presents for my brother, sister, aunts, uncles, cousins, second cousins, the mailman, and the people down the street. Well, that is a bit of an exaggeration, but I was buying a few books because they were cheap. Now, that I have enjoyed the experiences of getting new books for almost nothing, it is time to think about what the death of Borders means for those of us in the history business, and it isn’t good.

Borders died because of bad management. The issue was not misreading the rise of e-books as business journalists have widely reported. Yes, Borders was late in advancing into that market, but it is still a small niche, accounting for roughly five percent of sales. The real problem that Borders faced was that they had the wrong people in the wrong jobs. Buyers in military history had years of experience in romance fiction, or knew mystery fiction but were responsible for science fiction. They put the wrong books on their display tables and did not know the importance of the people writing blurbs on the back of books. They under ordered titles that turned out to be best sellers and bought a thousand copies of academic books and then barely sold a hundred copies.

They were also notorious for not paying their bills and this dunning of publishers is the real problem that is going to have real, long term ramifications for historians because of the way publishers responded to this issue. Some—the smart ones—simply cut off Borders and said no more new books until you pay your old bills. The publishing houses that took this hard line were taking a gamble, because this attitude was a good way to alienate a major, major retailer. As it turns out, this approach was the right one and Borders to some degree paid these bills. Other publishers decided to keep selling books to Borders on credit, essentially making a de facto investment in the future of this chain that blew up in their faces. The business directors of these presses simply thought Borders was too big to challenge. According to gossip in the profession, the chain owed some major academic presses amounts reaching into six figures. It is even worse for the trade presses. Borders owed those firms millions. These publishers have all filed liens as creditors in the bankruptcy proceedings surrounding the death of this corporation and will get some of that money back, but not all of it or even most of it.

That means that publishers large and small are taking financial hits. Some will be better able to absorb this lose than others. The result is that a number of academic presses are going to be unable to publish new titles. Intellectual merit is no longer going to be enough to earn a book contract. Editors—even those at prestigious operations that thought they were above base commercial concerns—are going to have to ask some hard questions about new acquisitions: can we make money off of this title?

The ramifications for individual scholars are immense. A real possibility is that certain types of history will not get published at all. For example, military history, while not popular among most historians, has the advantage in that it sells. Political history, particularly the kind that focuses on White House, also does quite well. American history does better than European or any other region. Another development is that narrow case studies might very well never see the light of day. If it cannot get adopted in undergraduate courses, presses are not going to be interested. Along those lines, I would not be surprised if editors become more demanding in their expectations of writing ability. Poorly written books are more difficult to sell than those that are an easy read. I can also see a future where presses require that authors, particularly new ones without much of a track record, subsidize publication. And if you need a book to get tenure or be viable as a job candidate, you will pay the $2,000 that they ask of you.

This requires even more thought on the part of historians in training. Not only do you need to think about dissertation topics in the context of how you will make an intellectual contribution to the field of history, but also of how commercially viable is your topic. It also requires some careful thought on your field of study. Are there legitimate publishing opportunities in a study of religious practices in Republican Rome or is it in a military history of the U.S. Civil War? These are serious issues and ones deserving of some discussion with your supervising professors.

Blog CXII (92): The New Status of the Article

2011-08-23T12:20:00.001-04:00

Mike Creswell of The Florida State University was in Newport a few weeks ago—he is the author of Blog VI (6): Getting in the Door: The Graduate Admissions Process—for a conference and we had lunch during his stay here. During that conversation we got to talking about the media formats and how long they endure. The new communication technologies are affecting every media format, including old ones like book publishing. Witness the slow death of the Borders book store chain. It is also affecting journal publishing. This conversation was less boring than it sounds, because a lot of it revolved around the rise and fall of Playboy magazine.

These new technologies are proving to be both an opportunity and a challenge for a journal publishers. Subscriptions are down; many libraries—the main market for these type of publications—are cutting their budgets and one of the first things to go is the expensive journal. (The titles in history are fairly inexpensive compared to the ones in the sciences which often require very clear and detailed graphics in the form of charts and photographs.) On the other hand, profits for the publishers are up. Scholars can now buy electronic versions of single articles. For example, if you teach film theory in a communications school, you might not want to subscribe to The Journal of Cold War History just to get to an article it published on Star Trek, since the focus of the work in that publication is on diplomatic history. Now, though, you can buy that article for $6.95 instead of subscribing to the journal for $55. Subscriptions might be down but the sale of individual articles more than makes up for those loses.

Creswell also pointed out that journal articles are having more impact now than they did in the past. You can distribute an electronic version of the article to colleagues and students via e-mail faster and cheaper compared to even a few years ago when that process required photocopying.

The question then revolves around endurance. All this electronic stuff is good, but it is mighty perishable. I have made that point before in Blog LXXVIII (78): E-books: Just Say No. Books are books. They have a lot of endurance and impact. I spent the summer writing three historiographical essays for three different anthologies and it is clear that a book still has more impact than an article and will do more for a career. With that point made, this new electronic distribution format for the article makes a lot of sense; it gives you writing more breadth and speed than had been the case in the past. It is a good approach as long as libraries are also acquiring paper copies of the journal. All my previous comments about publishing still stands, but this new range and tempo is another factor to consider when you are deciding where to invest your time and energies.

Blog XCI (91): Honors to the Blog, Part V

2011-08-16T17:25:00.001-04:00

When I started this blog, I had some concrete ideas on things I wanted to say. I figured I would say them, and then be done with the project. All told, I figured it would take a year. Three years later, I am still at it, and the reaction to the was not quite what I expected. (For example, I have learned more about Roman numbering than I expected). For the first eleven months of this blog, I was not sure anyone else was reading what I was posting. Then, it "exploded." The explosion is a relative thing, though. My three year total for number of visitors is equal to the number of visits I generated in two months for a website I began in graduate school. The quality of those visits is a different thing altogether. The blog resulted me being part of an AHA conference panel, and through several different inputs I have learned that important movers and shakers in the history profession are reading this blog.

Every once in a while I like to take a moment to collect the tributes to this blog. This effort might be a bit of an ego message, but working on this project has been time consuming and feedback helps in many different ways. Some entries have taken over 120 man hours to put together. That is in addition to my regular teaching responsibilities, the writing and publishing of two (soon to be three) new books, and the regular obligations that one has when you have a family and a house.

Last week another small honor came my way. I was quoted--extensively as it turns out--in The Guardian, a British newspaper. The article "Careers for PhDs Beyond Academia; Traditional Academic Jobs are in Short Supply, but Anyone with a Doctorate has Skills they Can Take Elsewhere" written by Matthew Patridge appeared in the Friday, August 12, 2011 issue. My views will not come as a surprise to regular readers of the blog, but I learned some things from the article about alternative employment and I hope you will as well:

Much attention has been paid to the problems graduates face in finding jobs in the current economic climate. However, spare a thought for PhD students who, especially in the humanities and social sciences, may be in an even worse position. At the heart of the problem is the adverse effect of the government's cuts on universities, traditionally the primary destination for newly-minted doctorates.

"The academic job market is extremely tight … even postdoctoral researchers and lecturers are starting to contact us about alternative careers because they are worried about their employment prospects," says Terry Jones, a careers adviser with the Careers Group, University of London.

The problem of PhD students unable to find academic jobs is a global one. Military and diplomatic historian associate professor Nicholas Sarantakes, who runs In the Service of Clio, a blog about career management for historians, predicts that "the job market is going to get worse for PhDs over the next five years. Graduate programmes are overproducing each year and the surplus is getting bigger and bigger. At the same time, colleges and universities are downsizing their faculty and increasing their workloads. Supply is increasing at the very same time that demand is decreasing".

Sarantakes is keen to encourage students to consider jobs slightly outside traditional academia, such as working as librarians. Indeed, he teaches officers at the US Naval War College. Overall, he says: "There are many different jobs that will allow them to write and research and then make the transition to a faculty position. Creative thinking is a requirement for professional advancement and there are a number of places where a PhD can work and still make contributions to their field."

Jones agrees, and believes that part-time lecturing, or teaching individual courses, can help students gain contacts they can then use to win more permanent academic positions later.

Opportunities also exist for work in the private sector. Global talent broker MBA & Company, which connects firms of all sizes and across the world with experts, currently has 286 PhDs on its books. One example is Homayoun Dayani-Fard, who has a PhD in computer science from Queen's University in Canada, and has done work for a range of clients in the financial sector, including Coutts. The PhDs are a small proportion of the 6,500 people MBA & Company represents, but founder Adam Riccoboni says: "It's an area we're seeing more growth in."

Riccoboni, author of a book Buy Me!: 10 Steps to Selling Yourself Every Time, believes there are several steps that those with doctorates can take to make themselves more attractive to potential employers. In particular, he believes it is important to combat popular negative stereotypes of PhD students as verbose, individualistic and lacking emotional intelligence.

For instance, he suggests that students emphasise the communication abilities honed while giving presentations on their research. They should take advantage of the global economy and consider a wide geographical range of employers.

Jones agrees that negative perceptions can hold job-seekers back. "Although I don't want to generalise …many employers question the commitment of those who have spent seven or more years in academia," he says.

However, he thinks that this is unfair: "In reality, research students are constantly chasing deadlines and thinking on their feet … every new line of inquiry is in effect a mini-project."

Because of this, Jones believes that those job hunting need to make it clear that they have general skills as well as subject-specific knowledge.

Sarantakes's advice is very similar. "The PhD holder needs to emphasise skill-sets obtained from the degree: writing ability, foreign languages, research skills and an ability to set long-term goals and meet them," he says. "Those are the kind of skills that banks, news publications, law firms and advertising agencies can use."

However, he remains concerned that professors and supervisors are still giving the impression that students will automatically get an academic job, "because that is what they did and that is what was done before them".

So far three people have responded to the article on The Guardian's website. Their comments are as follows:

2011: worst year to start a Ph.D. ever. Dont do it. Please.

The next one highlights some issues specific to British academia. While these issues are unique to the UK, there are very similar factors at work in the USA:

The article highlights humanities and social science postgrads, but even in the "hard" sciences the output of PhDs greatly exceeds the availability of academic jobs. In my (physics) department, noone would ever suggest otherwise to the students. The vast majority of them do go on to good jobs; whether they might have done better starting 3/4 years earlier without the PhD is hard to say.

One important measure or research excellence of a department in the forthcoming research assessment exercise is (and was in all previous ones) the number of PhDs awarded. So we are expected to encourage students to do PhDs, whether it is a good idea for them or not.

The third commentator took difference with the second:

As a recent science PhD who is not particularly hopeful about academia - It would have been worse for me to get a job after my first degree. Not for the money (which would have been better), but because I would have been denied the chance to study a subject I love for so long. It's trite to say so, but most PhD holders are not in research for the money.

Blog XC (90): Tough Times

2011-08-14T23:31:00.000-04:00

This week’s blog entry represents a first. It reproduces three articles together. This is the first time that this blog has represented more than one article at a time. The first article is a survey of the job market for all fields in the humanities. It sets the tone and two more follow, examining the job market in fields other than history. The first article is “Outlook Grim For Prospective Professors: Disappearing Job Postings Prompt Ph.D.'s to Mull a Career Change. It appeared in the January 21, 2009 issue of the Chronicle of Higher Education and the reporter who wrote it is Stacy Cowley. The sixth paragraph discusses employment prospects in history:

The American Economic Association's job board recently sprouted a brand-new section: cancelled listings. Newly minted economics Ph.D.'s and postdocs looking for their next academic job will instead find pages and pages of frozen and suspended searches, more than 50 in all. It's the same story for classicists and archaeologists checking the American Philological Association's listings, which now start with a roster of misery—a rundown of all the positions that no longer exist. Job hopefuls in psychology, film studies, creative writing, and sociology have created wikis to swap news about spiked listings, a death register that includes opportunities at Dartmouth, Cornell, Harvard, Hofstra, Fordham, and nearly every open search in the SUNY and Cal State systems.

Never mind a hiring freeze. For those seeking jobs in academia, next year is looking more like a nuclear winter.

"Last year, about a quarter of the positions I applied for had their searches canceled, and last year's market didn't look as bad as this year's," says one aspirant, art historian Sandra Cheng. "I'm wondering how many of these positions I'm applying for are actually real."

Now a visiting assistant professor at Pratt, Cheng got her Ph.D. in May at the University of Delaware and has a résumé filled with fellowships and grants. She's seeking a traditional academic livelihood: research, travel, and teaching, at a university with tenure-track positions. But after a year of job-hunting and piecing together part-time positions, Cheng is wondering if the career she envisioned still exists.

"I do sense a permanent change," she says. "I wonder if this is the last leg for the tenure system."

At the American Historical Association's annual conference/job fair, held in New York earlier this month, researcher Sterling Fluharty presented a paper about the job market in his field with a blunt conclusion: "Job seekers in history need to think more about their employment prospects in non-academic fields." A grad student at the University of Oklahoma, Fluharty mined data and found that less than a third of those who earned a Ph.D. in history between 1966 and 1992 were tenured faculty as of 2003. Even before this year's market meltdown, the move away from offering full-time, tenured positions was accelerating. By Fluharty's calculations, within the next decade, 55 percent of all university history faculty members will be working in part-time positions.

As professionals in fields with weak demand head back to grad school to sit out the market for a bit, grad students are investigating their own options for staying out of the job fray. Katy Pearce, a third-year Ph.D. candidate in communications at the University of California Santa Barbara, had planned to wrap up her studies this year. But when she returned from a stretch of fieldwork in Armenia, she found that "everyone in my program that was expecting to go on the job market this year all bailed. They just weren't seeing anything being listed."

Pearce's program guarantees funding for up to four years, so she decided to delay graduation, focus on burnishing her publishing credentials, and hope hiring prospects in 2010 look brighter. But as schools cut back their undergraduate enrollments to bridge budget gaps, she's wondering if the demand will be there for new grad students and for professors to teach them.

"At the last conference I went to, I heard that one of the jobs that opened at Northwestern, 400 people applied for. Usually, 100 apply," she says. "So many assistant professors have gotten cut. For those of us just getting our Ph.D.'s, how can we compete against people who have already been an assistant for a year or two?"

Those odds have Cheng reconsidering her career path. She's thinking about detouring away from art history and going into academic administration—universities are businesses, and businesses always need managers to run them. But if she does stick with teaching, she'd like to land a school where she can concentrate on undergraduates. Cheng is queasy about the idea of encouraging future art historians along into a field unable to absorb them.

"For Ph.D.'s in the humanities market, it's almost like we really shouldn't make any more, because there's such a backlog of doctorates floating around out there and we don't have the jobs," she says. "The programs want more grad students to keep their departments floating, but is it really ethical, I wonder?"

The next article is about a group of scholars that should have known better, economists. The article “Job Market for Economists Turns ... Dismal” appeared in the February 10, 2009 issue of The Wall Street Journal. The author is Justin Lahart:

The dismal economy has claimed yet another victim: jobs for the economists who study it.

Columbia University's economics department, for example, isn't making any new hires this year. That's in stark contrast to last year, when Columbia poached eight economics professors from other schools, and hired one economist out of graduate school. The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Amherst College and the University of Minnesota all have suspended their searches for economics professors. And Harvard University has gotten permission to hire just one person -- only after "many rounds of negotiation," according to Harvard economist Lawrence Katz, who is handling recruiting this year. Typically, Harvard hires two or three economics professors out of graduate school.

Among newly minted economics Ph.D.s, jobs at top-ranked universities and business schools are the most sought after. Economists have also traditionally found more lucrative jobs outside of academia: at government agencies, at nongovernmental organizations, like the International Monetary Fund, and in the private sector. But with the financial crisis, economist jobs at hedge funds and Wall Street firms have dried up, leaving schools with more candidates to choose from.

The rollback comes at a historic time, as economists struggle to explain the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression. The crisis, which few economists saw coming, revealed deep gaps in many of the standard ways that economics approaches the economy, driving home the need for fresh thinking and talent.

But like just about everyone else, top universities have been hit hard by financial-market turmoil over the past year, and from anthropology to zoology, department budgets are getting cut. The endowments at private schools have suffered billions of dollars in investment losses. Public universities have seen meager growth in state spending on higher education, with many facing the prospect of large budget cuts.

Economics departments are a prime target for cuts -- especially since economics professors are costly compared to their counterparts in other departments. Indeed, universities have been willing to pay a premium for faculty members who can often fetch much better salaries at high-paying business schools and in the private sector. The average annual salary schools paid new economist hires was $86,292 for the 2008-09 academic, according to a University of Arkansas business school survey.

Economics has been a growing field in recent years. Undergraduate enrollment in economics courses surged in the late 1990s into the early part of this decade, just as a glut of economists who went to graduate school in the Vietnam War years reached retirement. That led many schools to beef up their hiring, which in turn has made the dropoff in hiring this year even more of a shock.

"Everyone understands that there are fewer jobs than last year, and it could be significantly fewer," said Oleg Itskhoki, a Harvard graduate student. Mr. Itskhoki whose academic work focuses on the interaction between global trade, wage inequality and unemployment, says that students won't really know the state of the market until the bulk of offer letters come out over the next month or so. Universities tend to do most of their hiring in the spring.

Young economists at major universities often have light teaching duties, and they devote most of their time to research as they try to string together the journal publications that they need to make tenure. Getting to make money while pursuing research in an academic setting is exactly what many graduate students would like to do with their lives. Three out of five graduate students hoped to work at a major university, according to a survey conducted by Middlebury College economist David Colander between 2001 and 2003.

The Fed in a New Light
One result of weak academic market for economists is that an institution that has often had a tough time competing for talent is suddenly looking brighter. The Federal Reserve, the lender of last resort, isn't quite the employer of last resort, but Mr. Colander's survey showed only one in five graduate students hopes to work at a policy-making institution like the Fed.

"I'm hopeful about the job market that we'll be able to get good people this year," said an official involved in the recruiting process at the Federal Reserve's Board of Governors. "We've got important work for them to do."

While the Fed may be able to recruit higher-caliber economists this year, it doesn't have the budget flexibility to beef up hiring. Over each of the past several years, it's taken on between 15 and 20 new hires, with a mix of new Ph.D.s and experienced economists, and this year expects to hire about the same number.

Employment prospects are a bit brighter at some business schools, such as Columbia Business School and the Wharton School. That's because they aren't as dependent on large endowments, relying more on tuition. "We are hiring in economics, and we are hoping for it to be a good year for us," said Columbia Business School Vice Dean Christopher Mayer. Despite a plunge in its endowment, Yale University's economics department also still plans to make a few hires, said department head Christopher Udry.

In their graduation year, economics graduate students prepare what's known as their job-market paper -- typically the best of the multiple papers that make up their dissertation -- sending it out to schools and other institutions looking to hire. After that first cut, they'll go to interviews at the American Economic Association's annual meeting at the beginning of the year -- a grueling four days where top prospects may go through 35 to 40 interviews. The last stage is "flyouts," where candidates visit schools to hobnob with the faculty and present their job-market papers before the department. Privately, students say even qualified candidates went through just a fraction of the usual number of interviews this year, and some schools have canceled flyouts.

Supply and Demand
Economists, being economists, use economic terms when they talk about the job market. Graduate students on the hunt are the "supply side," while the departments doing the hiring are on the "demand side."

The tightening of that demand side is bringing out the worst in candidates, Ph.D. students say. On a message board dedicated to this year's market (www.econjobrumors.com), anonymous posters are trashing their competition and and taking potshots at this year's top prospects.

The young economists have ample reasons to worry about what the weak job market will mean for them. Economists have written dozens of papers about the job market for economists. One by Stanford University business school economist Paul Oyer showed that economists hired into tight job markets end up not getting the top-tier job they would have landed in flush times. Its conclusion: Those economists tend to have less-productive careers. Knowledge like that makes competition for the remaining top-tier slots all the more intense.

"It's a pretty simple algorithm we use," said Yale graduate student Santosh Anagol, who is on the job market this year. "Everybody wants the highest-quality academic job." Mr. Anagol's recent research studies the economic role of livestock in rural India. His job-market paper studies how differing levels of information between buyers and sellers affect the market for cows.

Schools actually making hires this year face the difficult problem of figuring out how many offers they need to make to fill their slots. In most years, they'll assume that some of the people they make offers to will turn them down to take jobs at other schools. This year, said Princeton University economist Markus Brunnermeier, "the expectation is that more people will accept since they won't get any other offers."

Fortunately, Princeton's economics department includes some leading game theorists who should be able to figure out just what the optimal number of job offers will be.

The final article appeared a year later in the January 8, 2011 issue of the Los Angeles Times. Larry Gordon, the author of this article, focuses on the plight of language scholars, and it shows that little changed in that time. Here is the article “Language Scholars Feel the Pinch of Hard Times; At Annual Convention, 8,000 Compare Notes on the Economy's Effects on Education”:

As 8,000 literature and language professors and scholars gathered in Los Angeles for their annual convention this week, a lot of metaphors were tossed about to describe what many feel is the besieged state of their careers and classrooms during the recession.

Rosemary Feal, executive director of the Modern Language Assn. of America, likened the job market for humanities faculty and students to a "low plateau" and said those in the field face crowded classrooms, program reductions and work furloughs at the nation's cash-strapped colleges and universities.

"The humanities are under greater pressure right now than they would be in economically better times," said Feal, whose organization began its four-day meeting at the Los Angeles Convention Center and a nearby hotel on Thursday.

The problem, she said, may be partly the result of a misconception that English and foreign language studies do not prepare students for a range of careers. "Humanities are just as practical as any other majors," Feal said, especially during hard times when people need to be nimble about switching jobs.

The convention, the organization's 126th such meeting, combines a giant job fair for literature, linguistics, writing and foreign language professors with the chance to present academic papers and hear about the fields' latest research.

It also allows, for example, professors of medieval Spanish and experts on the novels of Philip Roth to mingle and swap tales of difficult deans and publishing triumphs.

The gathering has sometimes been lampooned as a festival of the politically correct and arcane. This week's 821 seminars include such topics as "Ha, Ha Hungary: Humor in Hungarian Film and Literature," "From Victim to Heroine: Redefining Female Detective Fiction Across Cultures" and "Refiguring Romance: Idioms of Love and Death in Old Norse Literature."

But the economy's effect on college life was a recurrent theme in sessions under the common heading "The Academy in Hard Times." A mixture of pride and defensiveness about teaching was evident, along with anger about what many participants called unnecessary budget slashing, particularly at state colleges and universities.

At one session, UC Santa Barbara English professor Christopher Newfield presented a scenario he said could come to pass a decade from now. In his vision, college students, families and professors will become disgusted by continuing tuition increases, declines in state funding for higher education and what Newfield described as the subsidies undergraduate fees now provide to corporate-linked scientific research.

The antipathy could lead, he predicted, to an "unbundling of universities," resulting in smaller "bootleg" schools seceding from bigger institutions. Such schools, he said, could charge much lower tuition and specialize in undergraduate teaching and the humanities without the costs of big-ticket research and sports.

Newfield said he would prefer that big universities reform themselves and treat undergraduates more fairly. But if that does not happen, he called for a move away from centralization and back to "craft mastery and intellectual independence."

At a seminar called "Teaching American Literature in an Age of Scarcity," Stephanie Foote, an English professor at the University of Illinois, Urbana, drew a connection between writer Henry James' glacially paced 1904 novel "The Golden Bowl" and the recession's effect on current college students.

Foote said that so many of her students take on jobs to pay tuition or to help their families that they have less time than earlier generations to read the longer works of the classic writers she teaches. In addition, the Internet and such short-form communication tools as Twitter have reduced students' attention span, she said. So Foote has substituted shorter books, such as James' "The Spoils of Poynton," which is about half the length of the 592-page "The Golden Bowl."

"They feel terrible when they can't do all the work," she said of her students. "This way, they can get a sense of how that [James] narrative works, but I know they can actually do it."

Throughout the convention, the weak job market was on many people's minds.

Matching Feal's "low plateau" description, the organization reported that the number of faculty job openings in English and foreign languages across the country was about the same as last year after two years of the steepest declines in four decades.

The 2,120 expected openings are nearly 40% below the numbers in 2007-08.

At the same time, the number of doctorates awarded in English is declining, a possible sign that graduate students are seeking careers in fields that offer greater job security.

The tough economy also is causing literature and other humanities departments to defend themselves against cutbacks on campuses around the nation, said Dartmouth College professor Donald Pease, who teaches American literature.

But such classes should not be justified only with arguments about students' employability, he emphasized.

"If you don't begin with the assumption that literature itself is a repository of human values that human beings need, then we lose everything," he said.

Blog LXXXIX (89): Growth Industry

2011-08-01T12:49:00.000-04:00

The poor economy is affecting all parts of society, education included. We are aware of some of the more basic issues, but one of the ones that has not seen a lot of attention is that community colleges are experiencing enormous growth right now. The article “High Enrollment Strains Two-Year Colleges” by Kevin Helliker appeared in February 9, 2011 issue of The Wall Street Journal. Since community colleges are growing, many new Ph.D.s should consider looking for work at these type of institutions. There are problems with this growth, though, as the article makes clear:

Community colleges, long regarded as the most accessible realm of higher education, are becoming more difficult to access thanks to record enrollments combined with belt-tightening by state legislatures.

A jump in enrollment helps to explain why Miguel Morales failed to get a seat in intermediate algebra this spring at Johnson County Community College in suburban Kansas City, Kan.

"You used to be able to wait until the last moment," said Mr. Morales, a 43-year-old part-time student at JCCC, where enrollment has reached new heights the past two years. "But it's getting to where you have to go online at three in the morning to get a spot in some classes." (A JCCC spokeswoman said few if any classes close out in a matter of hours.)

In a survey to be released Wednesday by the Pearson Foundation, a nonprofit educational think tank in Mill Valley, Calif., about 20% of 1,434 community college students interviewed in November reported difficulty enrolling in required courses for the fall semester. About one in three had trouble winning a spot in desired classes.

Those problems are mild next to enrollment caps that could be imposed in California and possibly other states. Budget cuts in California could force its community-college system—the biggest collegiate system in the U.S., serving about 2.76 million students—to turn away about 350,000 applicants next year.

"It's disturbing," said Thomas Bailey, director of Columbia University's Community College Research Center in New York City. But given cost constraints, "community colleges need to figure out some way of limiting their enrollment."

Like more expensive four-year state schools, community colleges rely on tuition and state money. They keep tuition low to be more accessible, but that means states subsidize a larger share of student costs; in the current economy, states are looking to limit spending.

Meanwhile, graduation and retention rates at junior colleges are lower than at four-year schools. The Pearson Foundation survey suggests that community-college students are less likely to establish a relationship with their schools, perhaps exacerbating the high dropout rates. In the survey, 74% of those who dropped out said they never discussed their intention to quit with an instructor or adviser.

The limits of community colleges have received little attention as politicians ranging from state governors to President Barack Obama have praised the two-year schools as a vehicle for increasing the number of Americans with advanced degrees.

Amid the recession, the percentage of high school graduates bypassing four-year colleges for two-year colleges has jumped.

In California, an admissions system that favors students who are already enrolled could make it difficult for incoming freshmen to win spots in classes. That has given rise to a proposal to place perennial students—those who accumulate credit after credit without ever graduating—at the back of the line.

Some educational experts are skeptical that community colleges will ever serve as an effective bridge to baccalaureate degrees. While the new Pearson Foundation survey and other polls consistently show a majority of community college entrants aiming for a four-year degree, a recent report from the National Center for Education Statistics shows that fewer than 12% of students who entered a two-year school in 2004 had a baccalaureate degree by 2009.

"Unless two-year colleges substantially improve their success at getting their graduates into four-year colleges and universities, the end result will be a substantial decline in baccalaureate degree attainment rates in future years," said Thomas G. Mortenson, an analyst for a think tank called Postsecondary Education Opportunity, wrote in a 2009 research paper and reiterated in a recent interview.

Many community colleges are scrambling to accommodate demand. Even with a tight budget, Johnson County Community College has added classes. Some junior colleges have added midnight courses to meet demand. A space crunch at CUNY, the New York City system of six community colleges, has led to a waiting list and creation of a one-month winter term for core classes.

To many in community-college administration, accessibility remains a near-sacred obligation. While conditions are more crowded at CUNY, for instance, a spokesman said, "Our two-year schools are open-admission institutions. They accept students who have high school diplomas."

Columbia's Dr. Bailey said some community colleges are considering establishing an academic bar. "They're saying, 'Maybe we should set a floor—a certain level of skills you need to have' " to win admittance.

Blog: LXXXVIII (88): Adjuncts and the Community College

2011-07-28T13:19:00.001-04:00

Grand Rapid, Michigan is best known as the hometown of former President Gerald R. Ford. It is also home of Grand Rapids Community College. This institution just like the University of Massachusetts is facing growing issues. The following article by Dave Murray, a reporter with The Grand Rapids Press, entitled: "GRCC Faculty, President Split over Adjunct Hiring; President says it's the Best Way to Accommodate Growth" also explores the job market from the perspective of the institution; a less prestigious institions than UMass, but the type of school that hires more Ph.D.s than the research universities. This article appeared in the October 24, 2010 issue of the Press on its front page:

GRAND RAPIDS—Full-time faculty at Grand Rapids Community College are speaking out against the school's rapid growth and the president's management and hiring strategy, specifically that part-time faculty now teach more classes than they do.

Faculty union leaders say they have become disenchanted with President Steven Ender in his second year at the helm, contending he doesn't work closely enough with professors and others before making big decisions.

"We have become GRAC—Grand Rapids Adjunct College," union President Frederick van Hartesveldt III told trustees at a meeting last week, speaking at the urging of the Faculty Council.

"We need to grow, but it's like we're on steroids," he said. "Both the rapid growth and the steroids are unhealthy. We don't have the support, the framework, the systems, the personnel in place for the rapid growth which we've undertaken."

Ender makes no apologies, saying the record enrollment prompted a rash of hiring. And he thinks he was hired in part to bring a fresh, outsider's perspective to the college.

"I believe that's my job, to make decisions," he said. "The buck stops with me, and I'm accountable to the Board of Trustees."

Van Hartesveldt said the college needs to slow down enrollment, now at a record 17,920 students, and a 5.5 percent increase over last fall. The administration has been hiring teachers to meet the demand, but largely part-timers.

Van Hartesveldt said the college has about 260 full-time professors, but 940 adjunct instructors. The full-timers are covering 4,470 contact hours—time spent before students—while part-timers cover 4,620, about 51 percent.

He said Ender last year said his goal was to have full-timers cover 60 percent of the hours.

"Human capital should be our first priority, our foundation," Van Hartesveldt said. "We're an institution designed and built on permanent full-time employees. The irony is that we are in the business of creating jobs for other people, and we need to be creating jobs here."

The number of adjuncts poses a strain on department heads, who van Hartesveldt said spend more time dealing with training and other issues tied to part-timers. He said full-timers also are expected to serve on committees and perform community service.

There also is no effective way to tell if the often inexperienced instructors are doing a good job, he said, because they are checked by student evaluations and an occasional observation.

Ender gets credit, Van Hartesveldt said, for doing a "tremendous job" raising money for the college, building a capital campaign to renovate buildings and purchasing the former Davenport University campus on Fulton Street.

But he said employees are disenchanted by his decision-making."

To be a productive institution, labor and leadership need to truly collaborate," he said. "We have become less so."

Salary comparison coming
The union is working with a contract extended a year while a consultant wraps up a comparison of GRCC salaries with those at other community colleges in the state and region.

The most recent union contract, approved in 2008, gave professors pay hikes of 2 percent annually, but also froze overtime pay for full-time professors.

A 2007 salary survey by The Press showed that nearly half of GRCC's full-time professors made more than $100,000 by combining base salaries with an extensive overtime plan.

Van Hartesveldt said the union will propose contract terms to cover both hiring and growth.

"Our desire is to raise quality and morale, maintain fiscal responsibility, and garner those esteemed marks of distinction -- not marks of mediocrity," he said.

Ender said the enrollment growth is based on "unprecedented demand" fueled by a bad economy.

He also said that the cost of attending a four-year school has risen to the point that many families can't send their children there the first two years.

"We're growing because we're responding to our community's needs," he said. "People are coming to us to be retrained so they can get a job or upgrade their skills so they can keep the job they have. These are real people with real problems, and it's our job to serve them."

Goal is 60 percent full time
Ender said his goal is to have full-time professors on a tenure track account for about 60 percent of faculty. But he said it's difficult to hire that many full-timers until he knows if enrollment will continue to grow.

He's also waiting to settle a the next faculty contract, which hinges on the compensation comparison.

"I can't continue to hire people while I'm still working with a contract that just do not believe is sustainable," he said.

Ender said the college hired adjuncts to make sure it could offer classes to the 3,000 new students, and said there were skilled people available to teach because of the region's high unemployment.

"And by doing that, we've created hundreds of jobs," he said. "That's a short-term solution, but we've got some great people in the adjunct ranks, and that helps the students. I look at it as a win-win-win situation."

By speaking out about adjunct hiring, van Hartesveldt raised the ire of some part-timers, and later sent a letter of "clarification."

"Please don't construe my comments to the board of trustees as an attack on adjunct faculty," he wrote. He said the staffing model is the issue, not performance.

"To run our entire college that way is institutional mediocrity," he wrote. "It doesn't mean that adjuncts who teach their classes at or above expectations with little support are mediocre. It means it's a poor model to achieve institutional excellence."

Two-year schools across the country are leaning more on adjuncts to meet demand, said Michael Hansen, Michigan Community College Association president.

"Clearly part of it is a cost issue, as we're all trying to do more with less," he said. "Grand Rapids certainly isn't unusual to have adjuncts handling more than 50 percent.

"But there's an advantage in flexibility and expertise. Many of these people are experts in their fields who want to teach a little."

Blog LXXXVII (87): Take a Number

2011-07-18T15:11:00.001-04:00

This blog has spent a lot of time offering professional advice to individuals—which is its main purpose—but to perform that mission we also need to take a look at the perspective of the institutions. A lot of essays in this blog have been complaining about the fate of adjuncts and underemployed Ph.D.s but what is happening to colleges and universities? Particularly in this economic environment? The following article from the December 19, 2010 issue of The Boston Globe entitled “A Course Correction: UMass Tackles Challenge of Crowded Classes, Smaller Faculty” shows us that they are not having an easy time of it either and puts the adjunct phenomenon into a larger context. The situation that the University of Massachusetts, Amherst is facing is not so different from those at Ohio State, the University of Texas, and so one. One of the implications of this article is that the job market is not going to get better anytime soon. Here is the article:

AMHERST—Charlie Ciano slipped into a quiet nook in the hallway between classes and nervously flipped open her laptop. With each passing minute, her chances of enrolling in the courses she wanted next semester dwindled.

Fingers crossed, the UMass junior logged onto the university’s online registration system. Just 20 minutes into her assigned enrollment period, the screen was already crowded with blue squares, indicating that half of her choices were full.

“I know that in the end, I’m going to have to take something I’m not interested in just to graduate on time,” Ciano said.

Overbooked classes are among the academic hurdles many undergraduates face at the University of Massachusetts Amherst—a campus struggling to break into the top ranks of public universities after losing nearly a fifth of its tenured and tenure-track professors in the past two decades.

Classes at the flagship campus can be so large that some students sit on the floor in lecture halls, leaning against their backpacks, the walls, or the legs of fellow classmates. Nine percent of all classes have more than 100 students—compared with a national average of 2 percent, according to a College Board analysis of public universities. Faculty lament that they have little choice but to evaluate students in oversize classes by multiple-choice exams and use computers to grade homework.

Some professors have made attendance at lectures optional, offering as an alternative prerecorded lessons over the Internet, which allows the university to serve many more students than would fit into an auditorium. Some students have even received letters from their departmental advisers suggesting that they take classes at other colleges to improve their odds of graduating in four years.

“We’re offering less than we could,” said Sigrid Schmalzer, a history professor. “This is a cheaper way of selling degrees, but I really worry about what’s happening to the quality of our education.”

Relying on adjuncts
The diminished size of the permanent faculty—described in a UMass report as considerably smaller than at top public research universities—presents a serious challenge to Chancellor Robert Holub’s goal of improving UMass’s national reputation.

The number of faculty in the tenure system, the lifeblood of research universities, has dropped from a high of 1,201 in 1987 to 978 today, even as the number of undergraduates has risen slightly, to just over 20,000.

Holub, who wants to have 1,200 tenure-system faculty members and 22,500 students by 2020, said a robust faculty is essential as the university seeks to improve undergraduate education, increase the number of doctorates it awards and the amount of research produced on campus, and boost its overall prestige.

But he also argues that when adjunct lecturers who work on temporary contracts are included, the overall student-faculty ratio at UMass is 18-1, which he says is similar to peer universities. And despite the decline of tenure-system professors, the total number of full-time faculty is about the same size as it was 20 years.

“Nationally, when looking at student outcomes, the key factor is not whether you have tenured or tenure-track faculty, but whether you have full-time faculty,” Holub said.

He said the university is working to improve the ability of students to enroll in the classes of their choice, as well as to add more small classes.

“It is a priority of ours to have students get into the classes that they need to make progress toward their degrees,” Holub said. “We’re dedicating resources to it. You don’t hit it on the nose every semester.”

The number of classes enrolling fewer than 20 students increased by 31 percent over the last year. This year, the university reduced the number of students in each freshman writing section from 24 to 15.

Holub has also instituted freshman seminars of no more than 18 students to expose first-year students to some of the university’s top professors.

And the university recently announced a $182 million investment in its honors college for a small percentage of elite students, who have greater access to smaller classes and meaningful contact with permanent faculty.

“We are really attacking these problems,” said Provost James Staros. “It’s not that they don’t exist, but we’re not sitting back and doing nothing.”

But many professors and students are less sanguine.

For professors, heavier workloads leave them less time for research and hurt their ability to advise students and write letters of recommendation. And while students overwhelmingly reported being satisfied with their college experience in a UMass survey of the last three graduating classes, nearly a third of respondents said they were disappointed by the quality of academic advising, as well as career preparation and guidance.

“UMass right now has the reputation as a decent school, but not the greatest,” said David Robertson, a junior majoring in political science and economics. Robertson said he sees the oversubscribed classes and faculty shortage as significant problems for the university.

“They’re putting effort into becoming one of the front-runner universities, like Michigan and California,” he said. “But if you want better educated students who will go on to do great things and donate to the university down the road, this is detrimental to their own cause."

‘The wrong direction’
Many other public universities facing budget pressures have also replaced tenure-system faculty with adjunct professors and have introduced online options to meet student demand—coping strategies that are expected to increase, according to national higher education experts.

“It’s happening all across the country,” said Molly Broad, president of the American Council on Education in Washington, D.C.

But the cutbacks—and their resulting challenges—are detrimental to UMass’s aspirations to rise into the upper echelon of the nation’s public universities.

“UMass has the very hard job of trying to increase their momentum in quality and recognition at a very tough time,” Broad said.

State funding makes up 25 percent of UMass Amherst’s revenues today, down from 40 percent in 2000. And Holub expects that the state’s budget difficulties will lead to more than $18 million in cuts next year.

To help make up for declining state funds, UMass Amherst has raised tuition and fees to $11,732 a year, one of the highest price tags among the nation’s public universities. It currently ranks 49th out of 598 public four-year universities in cost, according to a Chronicle of Higher Education survey. And the university is considering instituting an additional “flagship fee” that could add hundreds of dollars to the bill for Amherst students.

Only half of UMass Amherst students graduate in four years, and 66 percent do so in six years. The university lags behind its peers, where an average of 73 percent of students make it through in six years, according to a UMass report comparing the university with a group of 10 schools including the University of Connecticut and Rutgers.

Large lectures are common on nearly every college campus. But the experience is the norm for many UMass students, particularly freshmen and sophomores. Some sit through several classes a day in the 469-seat Mahar Auditorium, the largest lecture hall on campus, which is fully booked from 8 in the morning until 5 in the evening.

In the last decade, the number of classes with more than 100 students has risen by more than 20 percent. Basic interaction with faculty that students at other universities take for granted has become nearly impossible for some UMass students.

Mikayla Astor, a sophomore majoring in resource economics and business management, said her accounting professor was so overwhelmed dealing with hundreds of students that she did not have time to answer her questions before a recent exam.

“I tried to see her during office hours but she said she was already booked,” Astor said. “Here I am, trying to learn, and it’s kind of hard. I ended up getting help from a friend.”

Erika Tabur, a junior from Northbridge, said she teaches herself from the textbook instead of relying on professors.

“It’s really frustrating,” Tabur said. “That’s how I got through calculus, and that’s how I’ve made it through chemistry.”

History professor Audrey Altstadt recently received an e-mail from a student asking her to write a recommendation for graduate school. Altstadt has only spoken to the student three times.

“Students will say, ‘I know you don’t know me very well, but the people I know are gone or too busy,’” she said.

The history department last year stopped requiring students to consult with their advisers before registering for classes. Instead, it recently started training students to mentor one another.

In the kinesiology department, hundreds of majors received an e-mail last spring with an unusual recommendation: Consider picking up courses at other universities.

“We’ve just had a large number of students not being able to get into classes,” said Frank Rife, who advises the 700 students majoring in kinesiology, the science of human movement. “So I suggested that if they were trying to stay on some sort of four-year pace, they should take some of their classes over the summer online, or at Salem State, Framingham State, UMass Boston, wherever it works for them.”

Biology professor Randall Phillis recalls that when he arrived at UMass in 1989, the biology department was home to 43 tenure-system faculty and about 250 students majoring in the subject. Today, 26 permanent faculty serve the needs of close to 1,000 biology majors. As a result, he said, some advanced or specialty courses, such as cancer genetics and invertebrate biology, are simply not taught.

On a recent afternoon, about 400 students squeezed into Mahar for Phillis’s introductory biology class. An overhead screen flanked by two smaller flat-screen televisions displayed a diagram of fatty acid chains.

Every few minutes, students were asked to answer multiple-choice questions displayed on the screens by pressing a button on a handheld device that resembled a remote control. It is the only way for Phillis to gauge how much of the material students understand when many are too intimidated to speak up in such a large class.

“The size of the class challenges my ability to ramp up the difficulty and slows my ability to move forward,” said Phillis, who also teaches a more intimate version of the class to 48 honor students, every one of whom he knows by name.

“Great education can be available here, but certainly not with a student-faculty ratio that keeps slipping in the wrong direction,” said Phillis, president of the faculty union.

Quantity and quality
Five years ago, UMass instituted a plan to hire 250 additional tenure-track professors by 2010. So far, it has only managed to increase the total by 61.

Many of the tenured faculty who have retired or resigned have been replaced by adjunct instructors, who now make up nearly a fifth of full-time faculty, compared with 7 percent two decades ago.

UMass students today, particularly underclassmen, are less likely to be taught by a permanent faculty member. Last academic year, tenure-system faculty taught just 45 percent of undergraduate courses; adjuncts taught 35 percent, and graduate teaching assistants taught the remaining 20 percent, according to university data.

UMass this year also increased the number of credits per class for some courses that satisfy graduation requirements, reducing the number of courses students need to graduate. The higher-credit classes are supposed to be more rigorous, but some faculty say the additional work often takes the form of online discussions or computer-graded homework.

“It is clearly driven, even if they don’t say so, as an effort to reduce the number of faculty you need to teach the same number of students,” said Robert Zussman, a sociology professor. “The expectation has cheapened.”

Professors say they are trying their best to cope. Many routinely allow more students into a class than the maximum occupancy posted in a room, banking on the fact that not everyone will show up.

Classics professor Debbie Felton has allowed upwards of 490 students into a 469-person Greek mythology class, and still had to turn away dozens who came the first weeks of class, hoping for a break.

“I get a number of e-mails from students saying, ‘Please, I’m a senior. Let me into your class,’ “ Felton said. “But I just can’t. It’s already overenrolled.”

The opening of a new science complex has allowed some teachers, like chemistry professor Paul Lahti, to use technology to teach as many students as needed, though not in the same room.

“Our goal in chemistry remains a seat for every student,” Lahti said, even if that means watching a piped-in lecture occurring in an adjoining room, a method Lahti employed last year for an organic chemistry class.

“We’ve struggled philosophically,” Lahti said. “Is it critical that every student have a seat in every lecture section?”

An online option
At 9:45 p.m. on a recent Wednesday, senior Ellen Trapp settled into her dorm room bed to watch one of her favorite professors on her computer. The class—Communications 288: Gender, Sex and Representation—was recorded last year.

The professor, Sut Jhally, leaned on a lectern and spoke about the representation of gays on television. An 1 hour, 15 minute lecture will often take Trapp more than two hours to watch because she frequently pauses to take notes and rewinds to make sure she understands the points Jhally is making.

“I feel like I’m in a lecture hall because this is exactly what I would see—the board and the teacher at the front,” Trapp said. “But all from the comfort of my own bed.”

Jhally began taping his lectures six years ago so more students would have access to his courses. The lecture hall he teaches in is limited to 230 students. Online, with lessons re-recorded every three to four years, he said he can reach 1,300.

Students perform just as well in online courses as they do in traditional classes, university officials said, and more than 1,000 undergraduates are enrolled in online courses this fall. In addition, many are taking new hybrid courses in computer science, biology, calculus, and physics, which combine traditional lectures with online instruction.

“I tell kids on the first day to come to class only if they want to,” said Robert Moll, a computer science professor. Fewer than half show up to his introduction to Java programming class.

Students who attend his lectures say they come to get their questions answered. Moll is so busy he has to delegate the answering of many e-mailed questions.

“If I can answer it in 15 seconds, what the hell, I’ll get back to you,” he said. “But if they say, ‘I’m lost. I don’t understand a concept,’ I say, ‘Go see a TA.’”

Moll has written an interactive online textbook for students to teach themselves computer science concepts. Practice programming problems are embedded throughout the text. Students submit their solutions, which are automatically graded on a remote server that also tracks each individual’s performance.

“The more cynical view from faculty, not without some merit, is that this is a way for the university to live with diminished faculty numbers,” he said. “There is some truth to it. But as an educator, I sort of believe in this do-it-yourself approach.”

Blog LXXXVI (86): Summer Seminars

2011-07-08T00:29:00.000-04:00

WEST POINT, NEW YORK—Many different institutions around the country sponsor Summer programs for scholars and writers. One of the best of these programs is the West Point Summer Seminar in Military History. It is a hidden gem and I cannot recommend it enough.

The Seminar was at one time a program that the U.S. Army official sponsored to help faculty at other institutions to develop enough expertise to teach the military history that was required for ROTC programs. That requirement was phased out and the department of history at West Point decided to run the program with private money as a way of bolstering professional interest in military history. I participated in the first Seminar with this new focus back in 1999 and returned to West Point to give a talk to on June 30, 2011.

The Summer Seminar is wonderful in that it is a number of things all at the same time: it is a graduate seminar in military history, it is a research seminar, it is a teaching workshop, it is a distinguished speakers series, and it is an opportunity to develop a professional network of like-minded peers. For me it was like taking a new Ph.D. field in military history two years after I graduated.

I found the teaching workshop element to be the most unexpected reward. I have to admit in my arrogance, I expected that the civilian academics would do far better in this regard than the military officers. The history department at West Point has a mix of civilian and military faculty. The military officers were fantastic at sharing their approaches towards teaching. They were far better teachers than the civilians. They had many ideas that I incorporated immediately afterwards and others that I still plan to use. (Like having students take the same exam twice; once on their own and once with a partner. The higher grade is the one they keep. Taking the exam a second time forces a student to figure out what they got wrong the first time and they usually learn a bit in the process.) I could go on, but there point is there is a lot of teaching ideas the Seminar offers.

One of the major features of the seminar was a series of “staff rides” that the group takes. (A staff ride is an educational tool that the Royal Prussian Army developed in the 1830s-1850s. It is basically a tour of the battlefield itself, supplemented with a series of historical readings before hand and a discussion of ethics and decision making at the location itself). The east coast of the United States is littered with battlefields from the French and Indian War, the American Revolution, the War of 1812, and the U.S. Civil War. (The seminar mixes up which battlefields it visits from year to year.) When I was a Fellow the seminar visited spent eight days on the road visiting mostly Civil War sites; this year the group had fewer but were more mixed.

A difference between my Seminar and this year’s version is that the 2011 group had several panels of experts discuss and/or debate the historiographical nature of the field. I sat in on one on the Vietnam War before giving my talk about the Soviet war in Afghanistan. The panel was quite informative, entertaining and drew a small group of visitors—faculty from other West Point departments and historians at a few other universities in the nearby area. (I am afraid my talk based on a chapter from my book on the boycott of the 1980 Olympics kept in line with the tradition of military officers doing better than the civilians; my contribution was part of a speakers series rather than a distinguished speakers series.) The Seminar also spent a day at the Roosevelt Presidential Library touring the museum part of the complex and learning about the archives.

The cadre for the program are very good about looking at major military developments across the globe. In this sense, the military history they teach is world history. A shortcoming of the West Point program when I attended and that still remains ten years later is that it focuses on ground power. The program pretty much ignores naval and air power. Of course, that omission reflects the major focus of military history. Few historians in the United States or in any other country focus on the other mediums in which militaries project force. The majority write about armies rather than navies or air forces.

Another unexpected benefit of the Seminar was that I developed a network of friends and peers that I have relied on time and time again. More than 10 years later the group as a whole is still in touch with one another. Having a group of friends and peers in your area of expertise is an amazing asset. To give you just one example, since 1999 I have attended a number of conferences and at least one other person from my seminar has been there; a number of us have put together conference panels. I should add that I dedicated my third book to the Fellows in my year group.)

I would strongly recommend people consider attending a summer program be it the West Point Summer Seminar or another one while they can. These modules are often three to six weeks in length and it is difficult to take that much time if you are married or have children of a certain age. A number of different institutions sponsor them. The best known are the Summer Seminars and Summer Institutes that the National Endowment for the Humanities sponsor. (Every year the number, topics, and locations change. Go to the NEH website to see if they are sponsoring a program you would like to participate in). These types of endeavors often provide house and/or stipends for their participants.

I would also recommend that you attend a program that allows you to build on your expertise but also stretch a little. For example, if you are a historian of Victorian England attending a seminar that focuses on the United Kingdom in the nineteenth century is not going to give much, nor is attending a program on modern Latin America, but perhaps one that focuses on British Imperial history in the 19th and 20th Centuries would be right. I attended three other summer institutes: one that examined security studies and was geared more towards political science, a weekend long program that focused on teaching security studies, and a six week long NEH seminar on sport history. These all helped this diplomatic historian develop expertise in strategy—which I know teach—and military and sport history, which was very important in helping him write a book about the 1980 Olympic boycott.

Administrative Post 14

2011-07-06T14:44:00.000-04:00

There was no posting last week because of professional and personal travel. There will be another one this week, which will actually be a report on that travel. But more on that in a bit.

While there was no posting to the blog last week, a number of small changes have been taking place. I have been going through various postings, correcting silently a few typographical errors. I have also been adding Arabic numerals to the Roman numbers in each essay title, since most people are not familiar with the expression of higher numbers in that system.

Blog LXXXV (85): A Session for All Conferences

2011-06-24T12:52:00.001-04:00

It should be fairly obvious to most observers of the history profession that the majority of new Ph.D.s are not going to get tenure track jobs in history department, at least not at first. Realizing that the Society for Military History—the main scholarly organization in the field—held a special session at its 2011 meeting for those seeking employment outside of a traditional history department. The session was entitled “Careers for Military Historians: The Federal Government (A Discussion for Graduate Students and Others in the Job Market).” The session was held on June 10, the first day of the conference in the third time slot. The speakers included:

Stephen A. Bourque , School of Advanced Military Studies, United States Army Command and General Staff College
Janet Valentine, Department of Military History, Command and General Staff College
Clayton Laurie, Central Intelligence Agency
Timothy Nenninger, National Archives and Record Administration
Geoffrey P. Megargee, U. S. Holocaust Memorial Museum
Mike Pavkovic, U.S. Naval War College
James Herson, U. S. Special Operations Command

A lot of people at the conference were looking for jobs. The career paths that these speakers represented were quite varied. None of them were in a traditional tenure track position in a history department, but some of them hold positions that are quite close like the teaching jobs that Bourque, Valentine and Pavkovic have at their schools. Others ranged from being historians for specific agencies and commands (Laurie and Herson), which basically require that the historian compile and preserve historically significant documents and conduct oral histories to museum work (Megargee) and archivists (Nenninger).

The session was a hit. Every chair in the room was full and there were many people lining the walls. The question and answer session went well past the scheduled end of the session and at least some panelists were sought out by eager job candidates thoughout the remainder of the conference with questions. My session at the AHA back in June had similar results.

Some of the important points that came out of this session

look for internships, even if unpaid, if you can do it—they get your foot in the door
many positions require security clearances
you may not get to work on exactly what you'd like to do, but the work will be interesting, and the pay and benefits are good
it can take a long time (up to a year, in some cases) for a hiring decision to be made
every agency is different; read the job description carefully and learn all you can from other sources
once you have a Federal job, it can be a lot easier to switch over laterally to one you like better

I want to urge the people reading this blog to organize other sessions like these at the annual meetings of other learned societies like the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations, the Society for Historians of the Early American Republic, or the Society for Historians of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era to name just three. It is time that we beginning thinking as a profession of other forms of employment for the history Ph.D. Show this entry to historians in other sub-fields or your mentoring professors to get them thinking about how to deal with the huge surplus of historians.

Blog LXXXIV (84): A Twist at the End

2011-06-16T12:45:00.003-04:00

Today’s blog is extremely long. The bulk of it is an article “Professor of Desperation: Bad Pay, Zero Job Security, No Benefits, Endless Commutes. Is this any way to treat PhDs Responsible for Teaching a Generation of College Students?” that originally appeared in the Sunday, July 21, 2002 issue of The Washington Post Magazine. The author is Eric L. Wee, a freelance writer who is a former reporter for the Post. My commentary appears at the end of this article:

As dreams go, Larissa Tracy's is simple. She'd get up and head to work at Georgetown University. She'd stroll to her wood-paneled office lined with her medieval literature books. Light would stream in through the windows as she'd wait to teach one of her classes later in the day. But before that she'd have time to chat with colleagues about work and teaching and life. Maybe she'd get lunch with one of them. Or maybe she'd work on an article about the lives of female saints in the Middle Ages, her specialty. In the summers, she'd travel and attend conferences. Life would be good.

She often thinks about that dream on days like this. On this chilly October morning she's merging onto Interstate 395, near her Shirlington apartment, and heading south on her daily 50-mile trek to Fredericksburg. It's 7 o'clock as her black Mazda Protege slides into the fast lane at 80 mph. She pushes hard on the accelerator and begins eating her toast. She needs to pass her first marker, the Quantico Marine Base, by 7:30—otherwise, she'll be late for her first English composition class at Mary Washington College. The clock doesn't stop ticking after that: She'll teach four classes at three different colleges today. And those are just some of the six classes she's teaching this fall term, double the normal load of a college professor. Or what used to be normal.

Tracy's itinerary today has the precision of a train schedule: English 101 at Mary Washington from 8 a.m. till 8:50 a.m. Office hours from 9 till 10 a.m. Another English class from 10 until 10:50 a.m. Back in the car by 11 a.m. Up I-95 to George Mason University. Another class from 12:30 p.m. till 1:20 p.m. Talk to students for a few minutes. Back in the car by 1:45 p.m. and race to Georgetown University. Grade papers and prepare for class while eating lunch. Class on Shakespeare and film from 3:15 p.m. to 4:05 p.m. Back in the car before the meter expires and head home. Then she grades more papers until midnight. Six hours later it all begins again.

It's not what she hoped her life would be like, but it's what she's gotten used to since finishing her PhD in medieval literature two years ago at Trinity College in Dublin, Ireland. Since then she's become an academic nomad. Unable to find a full-time job in one place, she needs to do this if she wants to teach and pay her bills. She tells herself that it's temporary. But in the new academic job world, she's running out of time. If she doesn't find that increasingly elusive full-time job soon, she could live this transient life for the rest of her academic career.

There once was an unwritten deal. If you were smart and willing to devote up to 10 of your most productive years studying for a doctorate, certain things would likely happen. A college or university somewhere would hire you. And if you did well there, there was a full-time tenured job in your future. The money wouldn't be great, but you'd be part of an academic community. You'd do research in your field. You'd live a life of the mind.

Then the deal changed.

States started to cut their higher education budgets. Costs at all universities began to rise. And as a growing percentage of the population began attending college over the past few decades, universities changed the way they operated. Critics call it the corporatization of higher ed. Colleges prefer to call it a shift toward greater efficiency. Either way, colleges started looking for places to make budget cuts. With personnel costs consuming a huge chunk of a university's budget, administrators across the country found their money problems solved by a type of teacher few people have heard of: the adjunct professor.

Adjuncts originally were local professionals who would teach an occasional college class on a part-time basis. The journalist would teach a course on news writing, a retired judge would speak about jurisprudence. Then colleges saw them as something else: cheap labor. Many had doctorates and were willing to teach a class for as little as $1,500. Often they'd accept less. They got no health benefits, and they were hired by the term. Colleges could let them go at any time. And they taught the general education courses the full-time faculty largely dreaded. Colleges across the country, primarily in urban areas, hired them in droves. Outsourcing and higher education teaching had finally met.

At the same time, universities have been cutting back on the percentage of full-time tenure-track professors on their faculties. With each one often costing more than $1.5 million over a career, colleges began to balk. Why pay a full professor $80,000 a year with retirement and health benefits when you could hire a part-timer at a fraction of that? Many universities concluded there was no reason. In 1970, part-timers made up 22 percent of higher education teaching staffs in the United States. By 1999, they were 43 percent, as their numbers swelled to 437,000. And one recent national survey of humanities departments found that about one-third made less than $2,000 a class. Meanwhile, in the 1990s, the number of new humanities, language and literature PhD graduates flooding an already saturated market grew by more than 50 percent. The result: Too many PhDs and not enough real jobs.

A new underclass of college teachers emerged. The "freeway flyers," like Tracy, turned their cars into mobile offices. Since each college offers them only a few classes, they cobble together four, five or even nine courses a term at two, three or even five campuses. They might be classified as part-timers, but their teaching loads are very full time.

The new deal is a crapshoot. You might make it to academic nirvana, but you could end up trapped as a permanent adjunct forever fighting traffic before the next class. Still, each year new graduates like Tracy come onto the market, thinking they're the ones who'll get lucky. "I ultimately believe that I will get a job when I'm meant to," says Tracy. "If I felt that this was what I was going to be doing for the rest of my life, I'd probably go crazy."

She once imagined she'd land a full-time job as soon as she graduated. Along the way, she did everything she could to improve her chances. She focused on the more marketable Anglo-Saxon rather than Irish medieval literature. She made women saints her specialty, an added bonus in a field that currently prizes all things female. She applied to 20 colleges for teaching jobs as graduation neared. They all rejected her. The next year she applied to seven more places. Seven more rejections. After a while, all the letters started to sound the same. They wrote about having to make difficult decisions. They wrote about how it wasn't a reflection on her qualifications. But, in the end, they all said no.

"I have a degree from Trinity College Dublin, and my supervisor is one of the most well-known people in my field," she says. "I'm 28. I have an article published already, and my first book is coming out this year. What more do they want from me?"

Two years ago she showed up in person at Mary Washington and started knocking on doors like a cold-call saleswoman. The approach paid off—sort of. The college hired her as an adjunct professor. Georgetown and George Mason did the same. So she hit the road.

The wheels haven't stopped spinning since. Each day she drives at least three hours. In fact, she frequently spends more time in the car than in the classroom. This past academic year she taught 11 courses, memorized 250 students' names and graded a thousand papers.

At Mary Washington, she's grateful to have her own desk in a small, shared office with no window. But after teaching there for a year and a half, she still doesn't have a clue where the campus library is. There's no time. When she's done teaching, she's off to George Mason, where more than 20 adjuncts share a communal room with a few desks. Or to Georgetown, where she squats in other people's offices, often working on the edge of a desk because she's afraid she'll disturb a faculty member's papers.

As Tracy finishes her classes and office hours at Mary Washington today, she's running behind schedule. She tears out of the parking lot at 11:20 a.m. and soon merges onto I-95. But at Quantico she sees her nightmare unfolding before her: cars at a dead stop and a backup for miles. Slowly the traffic starts inching along. It's 13 agonizing miles before she finally veers onto Route 123. She checks her watch. It's already 12:15 p.m., 15 minutes before class at George Mason. She weaves along the two-lane road as fast as she can but still arrives 15 minutes late. She parks, then runs across campus. When she arrives at her classroom door, panting, she sees half her students at the board scribbling their names before they leave. The others have already gone.

"I'm here! Sit down," she says as she tries to compose herself. Somehow she gets the remnants of her class to take their seats as she begins her lesson.

A few students linger afterward to talk about an upcoming paper. One student seeks her advice about transferring to another college. When she finally gets back on the road it's 2:30 p.m. In 45 minutes, she needs to start her next lecture at Georgetown. But the bad dream won't stop. In front of her on I-66 she sees more cars backed up bumper to bumper.

When she finally gets to Georgetown, she circles frantically for a parking spot. Maybe they waited, she thinks as she dashes to her building. Maybe they waited. She pushes out of the elevator and into the classroom. This time, the chairs are empty. On the chalkboard she sees the only message her students left her: WE WERE HERE. WHERE WERE YOU?

She picks up the eraser and clears the board, then heads out the door to get ready for another day.

The growing reliance on adjuncts, critics say, cheats the most vulnerable of students: freshmen. They're the most likely to wash out of college from a bad experience, the detractors argue. They're also the ones most likely to have a harried part-timer teaching them History 10 or English 101.

Even though there are some excellent adjuncts, people worry that the overall quality of teaching suffers. Can someone like Tracy, they ask, teach five, six or more classes a day consistently, spending hours a day in a car, and not cut corners eventually? Tracy says she hasn't, but those who've seen overworked teachers like her before say youthful diligence lasts only so long. Eventually adjuncts with such loads might start replacing essays with multiple-choice tests. Or start assigning books they haven't had time to read themselves. And then there's the dislocation and disorganization that comes from lecturing minutes after fighting traffic.

"The system is created to exploit people just like this," Richard Moser says about Tracy's situation. As a representative with the American Association of University Professors, he's focused on the plight of adjuncts. "You get some young PhD that's all eager and up to date and strong. You get to use them for a few years, and then sooner or later they'll get frustrated and angry. Then they get another fresh piece of meat to fill the slot and then use them for a few years and then they get burned out. You get rid of them, then you get another one. Is this the way to run a university?"

Many in teaching circles worry this is just the beginning. At some point, they fear, entire departments will be made up of part-timers hired by the term or by the year. The result, they say, would be the end of the traditional college faculty. Many of those same educators think that outcome ultimately may be decided by parents, who could revolt against paying $30,000 a year to have their kids taught by someone who's also toiling at the local community college. Students, meanwhile, seem largely oblivious to the difference between full- and part-timers.

"Someone had to explain what an adjunct was," says Valerie Sprague, a freshman who had Tracy for two classes at Mary Washington this year. "It's not even an issue . . . Do they get paid less?"

She wouldn't need to ask that if she'd seen a documentary called "Degrees of Shame." The film, by Barbara Wolf, came out five years ago, comparing adjuncts to migrant farm workers. There's also a book, Ghosts in the Classroom, that compiled essays from adjuncts with titles like "Adjunct Apartheid," "Adjuncts Are Not People" and "Adjunct Misery."

Despite all their angst, adjuncts are notoriously fearful about speaking out. They're afraid that one wrong word, in or out of the classroom, will mean that they won't be hired back. And they know they're particularly vulnerable when it comes to student evaluations. If they receive too many low marks, they'll be gone. It's a frequent adjunct dilemma: Be an easier grader and likely get better reviews, or stick to your standards and risk not teaching at that college again.

It's not all bad news for adjuncts, however. John Hammang of the American Association of State Colleges and Universities, which represents 435 institutions and systems, points out that many are happy with their part-time status. They have families and can't work full time. Or they're retired or have full-time jobs elsewhere and are uninterested in tenure. Adjuncts, he says, can improve the educational experience for students if used in the right way. They can bring real-world expertise into the classroom that's hard to replicate. Colleges can also react to student curriculum demands quickly with adjunct teachers even when they aren't sure if future students will be interested.

The harsh truth, says Hammang, is that not all adjuncts are good enough to be full-time faculty. At least being an adjunct allows them to teach. A number of college administrators also argue that this is the trade-off in the era of mass higher education. If you want to keep tuition down so more people can afford it and not increase public spending, you need adjuncts.

Take the University of Maryland Baltimore County, where 34 percent of the staff is adjuncts. The enrollment in computer technology-related courses has mushroomed by 60 percent in the past few years. The university can't find enough new full-time teachers to keep pace with the growth. Even if it could, it couldn't afford to hire them all. Adjuncts fill the gaps. Part-timers also allow the school to react on short notice to changing enrollment. This fall UMBC needs teachers for 40 additional classes. The administrators don't have time to do a nationwide search, so they'll turn to adjuncts. The alternatives, according to Provost Arthur Johnson: Raise tuition or cap enrollment. He likes neither choice. He points out that UMBC produces a large portion of the information technology graduates that Maryland's high-tech industry needs. "We're fulfilling an important economic role here," he says. Adjuncts make that happen.

The quality of education, Johnson argues, doesn't suffer. If anything, he says, students benefit from adjuncts who bring cutting-edge experience into the classroom in fields like computer science. And the salary, ranging from $2,000 to $5,000 a course, is fair, he says. Remember, he says, adjuncts don't have to advise students or do research. They make less, but they also do less. Their pay is determined by the open market, he says, as with most other jobs. "No one is forcing anyone to be an adjunct."

Still, Hammang's organization, which includes UMBC, thinks many of its members are overly reliant on adjuncts as states continue to tighten budgets. The late 1990s was a "missed opportunity," says Hammang. That's when colleges could have afforded to cut back on their adjunct dependency. He thinks there'll be another chance in a few years. The question is how much desire there will be to change.

Many adjuncts have decided they don't want to wait to find out. In the last few years, adjunct unionization movements have sprouted up around the country, and they're getting results. California has been one of the leaders, setting aside $57 million last year to increase part-time salaries at community colleges and an additional $7.1 million to pay adjuncts for office hours. Similarly, the state of Washington allocated an extra $17.5 million recently to raise adjunct pay at two-year colleges. More battles are raging from Pennsylvania and New York to Illinois and Wisconsin in both public and private colleges. This momentum hasn't hit the Washington area, but that could change soon. Look inside this fifth-floor conference room at UMBC, where six professors have gathered on this Monday afternoon. Some are adjuncts. Others have one-year renewable contracts. All are unhappy.

"The very fact that we are here means that we mean business," labor union organizer Scot Hamilton says to the group. "It's ironic. Universities are supposed to be the bastions of freedom, but when you look behind the scenes, they're very exploitative."

His colleague Cathleen McCann tells those assembled they can't rely on the university to treat them fairly. Only collective bargaining will do that. She's told faculty on six other Maryland campuses the same thing. As the lead organizer for the American Federation of Teachers in Maryland, McCann is scrambling to organize faculty members at the state's public four-year college campuses, where 38 percent of the faculty, systemwide, is part time.

By next year, she hopes, legislation will pass to force the system to bargain. If that happens, McCann could be sitting down with administrators by next summer to demand higher pay, longer contracts and benefits for all adjuncts.

Some places are changing on their own. The president of American University, where a quarter of the faculty is part time, last fall declared that the university will significantly cut back its reliance on adjuncts. The remaining part-timers will teach more, make more and have more responsibilities.

But some in academia, like Jonathan Loesberg, until recently chair of AU's literature department, think the use of adjuncts needs to stop altogether.

"I'm authorized to pay an adjunct here to teach a course something like around $2,000," says Loesberg. "That seems to me on the face of it exploitative. If such a person taught the standard full load at AU, which would be five courses, they would be making $10,000 a year without health benefits, without any type of retirement benefit, with no benefits at all—I feel terrible about it. But these are crocodile tears. I feel terrible about it, then I offer them the money. And yet the people are always happy to get the jobs because their alternative is not getting anything."

Tracy wants one of those adjunct jobs this fall. She sent an application letter to his department and received a terse e-mail reply saying someone would contact her later. She hasn't heard anything back. She's thought about showing up at his office and lobbying for the course in person—looming bills have made her bold. First, there's the $46,000 in student loans from graduate school. Then, there's the $10,000 in credit card debt. The only way she can make ends meet is by teaching four to six courses a term, with pay ranging from $2,385 a class at George Mason to the relatively lavish $4,695 a course at Georgetown. But the biggest financial crunch comes during the summer, when the teaching dries up.

Last summer Tracy didn't have any classes to teach, so she applied to 15 temporary agencies. After a month of waiting, only one found her regular work at $12 to $15 an hour doing proofreading. But at least that was better than the endless word-processing tests that the secretarial agencies had her do. "I have a PhD. I can't believe I'm doing this!" she would think. Then she'd put her head down and start typing.

She also tries not to think about her car breaking down, even though it has more than 100,000 miles on it. But one day in January she couldn't ignore the orange "check engine" light on her dashboard any longer. After a morning class, she pulled into a small repair shop in a desolate part of Fredericksburg. Half an hour later, a chatty mechanic explained that her catalytic converter was dead. That—plus a new battery and an oil change—well, that'll cost her $768. She grimaced, leaned an elbow on the counter and cradled her face in her hands as she tried to figure out how to pay for it. Her credit card was maxed out.

"That's it. Prostitution. Adjunct turned prostitute to pay for car repairs," she moaned to no one in particular.

Patrick O'Malley finished his PhD at Harvard a year before Tracy. Both started teaching in Georgetown's English department two years ago. The difference: O'Malley is a tenure-track assistant professor.

On this day when Tracy hustles between Fredericksburg and Fairfax, he sits in his office. Light is streaming in through a window. He looks relaxed with no classes to teach this term. He's on a full-paid leave from the university to work on his first book, which should help him gain tenure when the time comes. Whereas Tracy worked on her own book between jaunts on the freeway, Patrick spends his days in Massachusetts studying at Harvard's libraries. Even when he is teaching, his load is much lighter. When Tracy had six classes, he had three. Last year, he taught a reduced load of two classes a term so he could adjust to Washington and to his new university.

He walks from the Dupont Circle apartment he owns and takes a shuttle to campus, where he stays all day. While Tracy is scurrying between campuses, he's rapidly becoming an integral part of Georgetown's. He has time to go out to lunch with professors who can help him with his career later. He goes to faculty parties that Tracy rarely attends. The English department is filled mostly with strangers to Tracy; to O'Malley, they're friends and colleagues.

O'Malley knows about adjuncts like Tracy. He knows about the lives they lead and knows he couldn't do it. "It would be too exhausting."

Talk to veteran adjuncts about Tracy and they tell you they were once like her. They, too, thought being an adjunct was just a way station en route to their real lives. But then the years passed and at some point they began to realize they were stuck. They'd been tainted by the adjunct label and were never going to get full-time jobs.

"You're used goods now and you are going to have to face it," a colleague told one adjunct after he'd been teaching for five years.

Those who hire full-time faculty say that's not far from the truth. When they get 375 applicants for a single job, they need some way to weed people out. If someone's been an adjunct for a while, a search committee starts wondering what's wrong with them. It may not be fair, but it's how things work.

After a while, longtime adjuncts begin to resign themselves to their fate. Year after year, they teach out of cardboard boxes. They often give up on doing original research. Mostly they have time only to drive and teach. And they don't cross the invisible line separating adjuncts from full-time members. It's a line that makes one adjunct of 15 years, a winner of several teaching awards, wait till everyone else has eaten when there's food laid out for a department event. He sneaks in later to eat what's left.

On an early January morning, the sun is rising as Tracy tailgates a silver pickup in the fast lane. It's the first day of the spring semester, and she'll lead two classes today at Mary Washington. Then this afternoon she'll go to Georgetown, where she'll tell her class she's an adjunct professor, "which means I'm pond scum."

But at this very moment as she cruises down I-95, she's thinking about the lletter she got just yesterday from the University of California at San Diego. It's the sixth rejection she's gotten in this round. She still hopes one of five more applications, to Bucknell, Duke, Fordham, Spelman or Toronto, will come through. But she has more immediate worries. She doesn't know if she'll have any classes to teach this summer. That's still weighing on her mind that afternoon as she sits at the Tombs, a bar in Georgetown. "Maybe I could work here this summer?" she says to the bartender. He nods, not sure if she's joking.

She makes another push. "So if I need a job for this summer, can I hit you up?"

As she eats, she thinks about what it would be like being a professor and serving burgers and beer to students. She decides she could handle that. At least it's a job.

"I've waited tables before in Dublin," she says. "I'm not above working in a bar."

The last application responses eventually trickle in. By March they've all told her no. She tries to stay positive, but she can't help but wonder sometimes if maybe, just maybe, she's not good enough to make the cut. It's been nearly two years since she graduated, and 38 places have said they don't want her.

"It's frustrating because I would have thought at this point in my career, I would have at least gotten an interview."

Over the next month, a new hope arises. George Mason has a one-year position open in the English department. The money would be better and the course load lighter. It would be a good launching pad for a full-time job somewhere else. Once more she puts her name in, and once more she lets herself hope.

On a bright May morning, Tracy heads to her car in hurry. She weaves through the back roads toward Alexandria. Her classes are over for the summer break. Today is her first day of work in a different capacity: as a temp. She managed to get two classes to teach during this break, but she still needs clerical work like this.

She heard back about the one-year George Mason job. She didn't get it. So, when next term comes, she'll have four adjunct classes between Georgetown and George Mason. She told Mary Washington that she isn't going to work there anymore. The drive was killing her. Instead, she's going to see if she can drum up one more class in this area. And in a few months, she'll send out more resumes for more full-time jobs. Meanwhile, she's coming out with a book and another paper. Her chances of landing a real job this year, she tells herself, are better than ever. She isn't about to give up her quest anytime soon, she says. She's put too much of herself into academia to do that. "I'll keep applying. There's not much more I can do."

She pulls into a parking lot, grabs her lunch and hurries toward a marble-and-chrome office building, where she'll spend the next eight hours looking for typos and spelling mistakes. She steps inside and waits for the elevator. Sometimes there is nothing she can do but wait.

I originally included this article for three reasons. First, one of the things that I have learned since I started this blog is that the surplus of Ph.D.s is not limited to the field of history. Tracy has a Ph.D. in literature and had problems getting a job. Her situation is pretty typical. The second reason I decided to post this article is that it was published nine years ago. It shows us that this massive glut of Ph.D.s is nothing new, and since programs are overproducing every year, the glut just keeps getting bigger and bigger. The third reason is I feel it captures the desperation and frustration of being on the adjunct circuit.

Then, I got curious. What happened to Larissa Tracy in the last nine years? How much longer did she continue to adjunct? What did she do instead? A quick search on google found her and a quick exchange of e-mails resulted in a phone interview.

Turns out this story ends on a happy note. She is now teaching in a tenure track position at Longwood University in central Virginia. She published a book Women of the Gilte Legende: A Selection of Middle English Saints’ Lives (2003), and recently received tenure.

It was not easy getting to this place in her career, though. She continued to adjunct for another year. She made ends meet in the summer by working as a proofreader and copyeditor. Then, she received a visiting appointment at American University where she worked full-time for two years. This position was salaried, which means her income increased significantly and she had health benefits. She obtained the position at Longwood two years later.

She is not, though, a fan of “Professor of Desperation.” She feels Wee exaggerated the story. The only time she missed a class in the three years she was adjuncting was the one time mentioned in the story. She noted that it happened in September of 2001 when she encountered a rolling roadblock. It was one of those security things that happened in the D.C. area after September 11, 2001. She also added that the article made Patrick O'Malley look entitled. What Wee failed to mention was that O'Malley spent three years looking for work himself before landing his position at Georgetown, which he still holds.

When asked if the article helped or hurt her, she replied, “A little bit of both.” The people at American University recognized her name from the article when she applied for a position. In that sense, “it was very helpful.” No one on the search committee at Longwood, though, had never read it. She also adds that sometimes people think she is a troublemaker because of the feature.

That reading seems a bit unfair. She struck me in the article and more so in talking with her as someone who was dealt a bad hand and handled it well. Other readers had very different takes. Wee took part in an on-line discussion the day after it appeared in print. Go to http://discuss.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/zforum/02/magazine_wee072202.htm to see an archive of the discussion and some of those reactions.

When asked if she would do it again, Tracy quickly replied: “Absolutely.” She feels she got a world class education. She was taking part in academic conferences and presenting papers as a grad student long before she would have if she were going to school in the United States. “I had an extraordinary experience in Ireland.”

She also feels she gained from her three years doing part-time work. “I felt having been an adjunct prepared me a lot better than being a TA.” She feels it made her a “better teacher and a more humble scholar” than otherwise would have been the case.

In retrospect, she feels that graduate school did not prepare her enough for the work of job hunting. You might be applying for a job in your subject of expertise, but the people on the search committee might have very little idea about the major issues in that area even if they are in the same discipline. “Be prepared to explain your field to people who don’t understand it.”

Larissa Tracy had to wait and wait and wait for full time professional employment. It is a tough thing to do, but it is something a lot more people in academia have to do these days.

Blog LXXXIII (83): Stuffing the Ballot Box

2011-06-07T12:43:00.000-04:00

Back in Blog LX (60), I said students vote with their feet. Now some people ignore that fact at their own peril. The attitude is “I know what they need to know.” And there is a lot of truth in that statement. The problem is the students still vote with their feet. Sometimes that vote is because the instructor has a reputation as a poor teacher. At other times, it is because the course is offered at an inconvenient time. Most troubling is when the topic is important, but difficult.

You can make an argument—and it is a good one—that as a nation we have a crucial need to have more people study Arabic and several other foreign languages. The problem is they are not popular classes, even if they are important. This article “Should Class Popularity Determine Its Success?” that appeared in the January 23, 2011 issue of the Albuquerque Journal raises some real questions about important classes that fail to garner strong enrollments. The article focuses on language instruction at the University of New Mexico, but it raises important issues that historians need to consider. The reporter was James Monteleone, a staff writer for the Journal. At the end of the article, I offer some observations on what you can do to stuff the ballot box:

You won't hear many sitting around the University of New Mexico's Student Union Building chatting in Chinese. Or Arabic, or Russian, or Greek, for that matter.

That's because few students are studying them.

Although each language is taught at UNM, along with eight others, the courses are consistently among the university's lowest enrollments.

Students at UNM last year enrolled in more than 631,000 credit hours, excluding health sciences courses.

Popular subjects, such as English, mathematics, psychology and communications/journalism, each attracted more than 36,000 student credit hours for the 2009-10 academic year. At an average of three credit hours per course, those departments each hosted at least 12,000 students.

While some of those courses' popularity is because the departments teach classes required by a variety of majors, UNM's technical fields have also drawn high enrollments as students increasingly pursue high-tech careers.

However, 18 UNM programs enrolled fewer than 1,250 credit hours last year, according to university data compiled by the Journal. At that rate, a department would host no more than seven, 30-student classes each semester.

Nine of the 12 foreign languages UNM teaches are among the university's lowest enrollments. Two additional low-enrolling programs - modern languages and comparative literature - are included in the Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures.

Classes in Arabic, for example, drew just 180 credit hours last year, equal to about 30 students each semester; the Greek program taught 258 credit hours, totaling fewer than 50 students each term.

Recognizing that even the least attended courses bear a fixed cost, UNM has said everything is on the table when it comes to cuts.

UNM employs 13 tenured and tenure-track faculty in the Foreign Languages and Literatures Department. While that total includes two professors who teach Russian, which had only 513 enrolled credit hours last year, most tenured faculty teach the more popular French and German courses.

Unless tenured faculty can be cut by UNM, cutting programs will not save significant instructional funds, said Curtis Porter, the provost's associate vice president for planning, budget and analysis.

And, so far, UNM has said tenured faculty are off limits.

Other low-enrolling language courses, like Greek and Chinese, are taught by adjuncts, who can be cut at any time but work for lower wages and limited benefits.

Struggling Languages
Although language study was once the focal point of university studies, some language courses now enroll students each year by the dozen rather than the thousands.

"Areas that have been traditional mainstays of education, going back to the original (university) foundation in languages, it was fundamental to the way we thought about education for hundreds of years," said Wynn Goering, a vice provost. "As those enrollments fall off, those are where the really hard choices come now."

It is particularly difficult to measure the success of languages based on enrollment, said Natasha Kolchevska, chair of the foreign language and literatures department. Classes must be smaller than many college courses to ensure students can be part of a dialogue with their teacher.

She believes studying language is a critical piece of a college education and cutting that curricula because too few students enroll defeats the purpose of an academic institution.

"It is part of being an educated person, to have some languages and cultural skills or knowledge that goes beyond your own little corner of the world," she said.

Critics, however, question whether it's necessary to offer a dozen languages when most draw few students. While courses in Spanish, French and German report strong enrollments, Arabic, Navajo, Chinese, Greek, Latin, Russian, Italian, Japanese and Portuguese don't.

Among those are languages deemed more difficult to learn for English speakers, such as Arabic and Chinese, meaning the dropout rate is high, Kolchevska said.

UNM is the only university in the state that offers more than one semester in most of the low-enrolling languages courses, and the diverse offering is critical to UNM's identity as a state flagship university, she said.

For most of its foreign languages, UNM offers at least five semesters of instruction.

"I would certainly want to say that it makes sense for us to be investing money in things like Arabic, given the importance of Arabic today. ... I just think any good university ought to be teaching Arabic, and probably more students ought to be taking it," said Richard Wood, president of the Faculty Senate. "I'd say the same thing about other languages and some cultural studies programs."

Also, some of the offerings support academic goals, while others are necessary for UNM's long-term development, Goering said.

For example, Portuguese is critical to the goal of emphasizing Latin American studies, he said.

Given New Mexico's connection with the Navajo Nation, offering that language is important, despite the fact Navajo courses have fewer than 525 credit hour enrollments, he said.

"Shouldn't somebody be teaching this critical heritage language for our state? We keep coming back to, 'Yes. We should,' " Goering said.

For now, the University of New Mexico is committed to teaching these classes. Good for them, but that commitment might not be there at another university where you are teaching—so what do you do?

My answer stuff: the ballot box. There are ways to make sure students take your classes. This approach is something that can be really helpful if you have no reputation on campus; perhaps it is your first or second semester teaching. It can also be useful if you do not have a great reputation. Student recommendations and gossip only goes so far.

What does stuffing the ballot box look like? Create flyers advertising your class and put them on the trees, bulletin boards and kiosks. I created about half a dozen for a class I was teaching on World War II and plastered them all over campus. These flyers had images of the book covers, and had provocative questions like: “Pearl Harbor: What were the Japanese Thinking?” At the University of Texas at Austin, the history department had a systematic approach. There was a bulletin board in one of the main hallways where professors put short descriptions of their courses. Of course, that was before the internet, today the department has a section of their web page with these descriptions. Here is one for a class on the Civil War:

OVERVIEW. This course investigates the political, military, constitutional, diplomatic, and social aspects the American Civil War and its aftermath. It seeks to provide students with an understanding of the background and purposes of the war, the strengths and strategies of the combatants, and the reasons why the war took the course that it did. The destruction of slavery is a central focus of the course. The last third of the course takes up the history of Reconstruction, concentrating on how the various plans of the victors affected and were affected by the lives and aspirations of the vanquished and the freed slaves.

EXAMINATIONS AND GRADING: In addition to the final examination (which will be comprehensive) on Friday, May 14, from 7:00 to 10:00 p.m., there will be two midterm exams--on Monday, March 2, and Wednesday, April 8, at the class period. Each of the midterms will count 25% of the course grade. The final examination will count 50% of the course grade. The exams will consist of short-answer and essay questions on the material from the classes and readings (including any handouts that may come your way from the instructor). Enrollment in this course constitutes a commitment on your part to be present at all of these examinations. Exams will not be given ahead of schedule, nor will any make-ups be given, for any reason.

BOOKS: The following paperbacks should be purchased:
James McPherson and James K. Hogue, Ordeal by Fire: The Civil War and Reconstruction (4th edition)
Allen C. Guelzo, Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation: The End of Slavery in America

Gary W. Gallagher, The Confederate War
Michael Shaara, The Killer Angels
Albion Tourgée, A Fool's Errand: A Novel of the South during Reconstruction
CLASSES: Each class will consist of a lecture of 50-60 minutes, followed by discussion among those students who wish to stay. You may record the classes if you wish, but no laptop computers may be used or open during the lecture.

Another thing to do is to pitch your classes to your existing students. That was a popular approach at the University of Southern Mississippi, where everyone in the department used the same textbook for the two courses on world history. The pitch was also quite simple: you need to take both courses and we use the same book for both, so take the second half next semester and get more bang for your buck. Another tactic, is to make yourself available to student groups that have a like interest. For example, if you are going to teach a class on Japanese history, you might want to visit one of the weekly meetings of Anime Club (Japanese-style animated films) and see if you can give a five minute talk, or even incorporate some anime into your class.

Blog LXXXII (82): Adjusting

2011-06-03T22:27:00.001-04:00

I found this article in the April 19, 2010 issue of Maclean's magazine. It is an interesting piece on some of the adjustments academics need to make if they are going to go out into the non-academic world. Actually, I think it might be a good process even for some people going into academia. The article is entitled: "You're an Elephant. On a Job Hunt: Improv Exercises Help Ph.D. Students Learn to be 'Less Cerebral.'" The author of the article is Alexandra Shimo:

It's difficult to know exactly what Lisa Byers, 36, does wrong in her job interviews. Perhaps she's just not what potential employers were looking for, but it could also be that sometimes she forgets to breathe or she speeds through her answers when she's nervous. "I've not gotten a lot of jobs, so I must have been doing something not so well."

That's why, on a recent drizzly evening in Hamilton, Byers, a Ph.D. student in sociology at McMaster University, finds herself pretending to be an elephant. She's also swearing like a trooper, and vibrating her arms like a pneumatic drill. The exercises were designed to help people like Byers learn how to be "less cerebral" under pressure.

The brainchild of Allison Sekuler, dean of graduate studies at McMaster University and a professor in the department of psychology, neuroscience and behaviour, the improvisation program paired about 45 students (graduate and post-doc) with actors working out of Hamilton's Theatre Aquarius. The course is one of a series of programs the university introduced this year to prepare students for life outside the ivory towers. Peter Self, assistant dean for graduate student life and research training, helped organize the improvisation workshop. "People often say, 'Well, now you've got to enter the real world,'" he explains. "And how do you do that? We're attempting to help them with that transition."

Learning how to cope outside of academia has become particularly pressing as cash-strapped universities have sharply curtailed hiring new professors in the last few years. For example, the University of Calgary and the University of Waterloo are only hiring in "mission-critical areas." Some scholarship money is down this year, as many funds are linked to the stock market, so there is greater need to find outside work, says Sekuler. Universities have seen their budgets fall with smaller endowments, explains Roslyn Kunin, a Vancouver-based economist and job market analyst. "The tenure-track positions just aren't there and so there's a greater urgency to consider the private sector or part-time work."

Competition is fierce, and graduate students can be unaware of the demands of the business world, says Self. After years of not having to deal with the outside world, social skills may have suffered. Consider Alison Bonny-man, a 48-year-old mother of three currently doing her master's at McMaster in rehabilitation science. Since starting her degree, she's become a "social recluse," she says. The improv class taught her the importance of eye contact, which she usually tries to avoid. "You get intense, and trapped in your own world."

Eugenie Roudaia, 26, in the third year of a Ph.D. program in psychology, neuroscience and behaviour, believes improvisation takes people out of their comfort zone and teaches them how to think on their feet. Or to think a lot less. Several times, the improv instructors warned the students not to analyze, just "do," because over-thinking was constricting their movements. And it was true that some students had a unique gift for making any action, whether batting a ball or digging a hole, look like they were focusing a microscope in the lab. Others would pause mid-movement, as if they'd had a sudden change of heart ("what am I doing here?"), and their arms would go from enacting something with gusto to falling limp by their sides. "It might not look difficult to sing a rhyming song in front of 200 people," Sekuler says, before the Maclean's interviewer interrupts to say that it certainly does. Still, the performances can be entertaining. "It can be like watching a train wreck," Sekuler explains. "You never know when it's going to go off the rails."

Blog LXXXI (81): A Ponzi Scheme

2011-05-24T16:49:00.001-04:00

Today the blog will take advantage of the multi-media nature of the World Wide Web and presents an interview of Dr. Monica Harris, a social psychologist from the University of Kentucky, on WNYC Radio 93.9 FM in New York City. She calls the academic job market a "Ponzi scheme." Harris was mentioned in The Economist article that formed the basis of Blog LXXIII. She is now refusing to take on new graduate students given how bad the job market is these days.
View Full Audio on WNYC

Blog LXXX (80): RIP Rice U. Press

2011-05-20T09:30:00.001-04:00

With today's blog we return to the issue of electronic publishing. Below is a news article, "Rice University Press Dies Despite All-Digital Approach School Pulls Plug as Budget Pressures Climb" that appeared in the August 21, 2010 issue of the The Houston Chronicle. The author is Jeannie Kever, a reporter for the Chonicle:

Rice University is ending its attempt to change the world of academic publishing.

University officials said this week they will close Rice University Press next month, pulling the plug on an experiment aimed at making it less expensive to publish scholarly works.

But even as an all-digital operation, the press proved too expensive to sustain, former Provost Eugene Levy said in a statement released by the school.

Rice closed the press once before, in 1996. Levy, now a professor of astrophysics at Rice, provided funding for it to resume operations in 2006, when he served as the school's chief academic officer.

Every book accepted for publication was made available online for free, but none was printed until they had been ordered and paid for.

Subsidy had to end
The print-on-demand format was intended to make the project self-sustaining--there was just one full-time employee, no sales staff and no warehouse space needed to store the books. University spokesman B.J. Almond said Friday that the university subsidy was between $150,000 and $200,000 a year.

"Combined with pressures on the university budget from the broad fiscal crisis of recent years, the university concluded that it could not continue indefinite subsidy of the RUP experiment, as painful budget reductions were being absorbed across the entire university, including in the core of Rice's educational and research mission," Levy said.

Earlier this week, Rice said it had agreed to sell the student-run radio station, KTRU, to the University of Houston for $9.5 million.

Academic publishing operations have been under financial pressure for years, and a number have closed. Others have been saved only after the public - or at least the academic community - rallied to their defense.

And most are subsidized by the universities whose names they bear, said Richard Brown, director of the Georgetown University Press and president of the Association of American University Presses.The markets are, in most cases, not big enough to sustain the publishing presses," he said.

But Brown said he doesn't think the closing of the Rice University Press offers much insight into the future.

"It was a unique experiment," he said. "Universities, for the most part, are very supportive of scholarly publishing. Rice, for various reasons, decided not to continue the program."

Lacking printed products
Most academic presses have some digital operations, including making books available for electronic readers. But their revenue still comes mostly from printed books, Brown said.

"We have to strike some sort of balance," he said. "What was going on at Rice was unique and novel and new and different and interesting, but ... in terms of producing revenue, there's still a reliance on print."

Fred Moody, editor-in-chief of the Rice press, declined to comment on the decision.

Levy said books already published by Rice University Press will remain available through Connexions, an electronic publishing platform developed by Rice faculty.

Almond said no decisions have been made on what will happen to books that have been accepted by the press but not yet completed.

The reason for posting this article is simple but important questions: What if you had published a book with Rice? How long would it be available and accessible to other scholars? In 10 years will Connexions have updated;the formats in which these books are stored so that future versions of current operating systems can open them, much less new ones that have not been invented yet. What if only 15 copies of your book had been purchased through the print-on-demand format? What kind of influence is that study going to have? Friends don't let friends do e-books.

Blog LXXIX (79): Hail to the Victor

2011-05-11T13:39:00.005-04:00

In April 2011 Education-Portal.com an independent, online resource web site, ranked the twenty best Ph.D. programs in history in the United States. Education-Portal.com did not list its criteria or giving rankings to the schools, I think (it is a very confusing website); so I simply repeat the list as provided. While we can all quibble with the list, I am going to push that inclination aside for the moment.

All of the schools on this list have good academic reputations and there is some nice diversity. They are spread all over the country. California has four schools. Texas, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania all have two. Some of them are well-established programs and others have been making strong concerted efforts over the past few years to improve their professional standing. There are also some interesting omissions: three Ivy League schools are absent. There are also no schools from the Southeast.

In Blog IV, I recommend against anyone starting a Ph.D. in history. I still stick to that advice, but if you are going to ignore me, I cannot think of a better list of schools to consider. (Maybe because I am an alumnus of two of these institutions).

In the meantime, allow me to say congratulation to the faculty staff, students, alumni, and administrators that built these programs into impressive institutions. The top twenty history departments are:

Blog LXXVIII (78): E-books: Just Say No

2011-05-05T09:45:00.004-04:00

I am no modern day Luddite afraid of technological change, but e-books are a bad idea that the publishing industry seems more than ever determined to embrace even though it is bad for them and the scholars that they produce.

In January Oxford University Press announced that it is creating Oxford Scholarship Online, which will publish book-length studies in electronic format. JSTOR already has a similar project under way. Project MUSE has plans with New York University Press to create the University Press eBook Consortium, which will apparently have more than 60 university presses as members.

What are we to make of these developments? Joseph Esposito, an independent consultant who advises scholarly publishers, told Inside Higher Ed that they are attempting to challenge Google. “These publications are now trying to take control of these markets, find revenue streams there, and trying to keep Google from being the vendor of choice,” Esposito explained.

This development might seem like a good one at first glance. “Preservation is essential in the academic community and an important distinction between what we are doing and Google Books,” Heidi McGregor of JSTOR told Inside Higher Ed. “Working with publishers and libraries, we will ensure the long-term archiving of these works for use by future students and scholars.”

Not really. In fact, nothing could be further from the truth. Electronics are no substitute for the printed page. Consider the fate of the music industry. Until the 1980s, music was recorded on analog tapes that were easy to retrieve. When the industry moved to the digital medium things changed. In only a half dozen years the formats of the machines changed dramatically. Modern computers are often not compatible with older formats. “Say you have a Word file on an old Mac OS and you want to retrieve it,” says Paul West, a former archivist at Universal Music. “Look at the hoops you have to go through for that. Multiply that by an incredible factor to try to retrieve music.”

Here is one example. The band Smash Mouth had to rerecord chunks of their song “All Star” for a television ad. Why? Well, the digital master was missing tracks. Keep in mind that the song is not that old; it was recorded in 1999. That was a mere 12 years ago. Sound engineers at the EMI music label discovered that drums and percussion effects on many songs from the 1980s are missing. “You open a session even from 10 years ago, and it might have a plug-in that's not supported, so you don't have that effect anymore,” Greg Parkin, the vice president of archives at EMI, explained.

The Library of Congress issued a recent report noting that digital formats are “not inherently safe harbors of preservation.” Sam Brylawski, a former Library of Congress archivist, explained, “There's a paradox. We can record so easily now with digital recorders. But at the same time, the stuff is at greater risk than it used to be.” The Grammy and Oscar winning music producer T Bone Burnett, agreed: “Digital is a feeble storage medium.”

But books, publishers tell us, will be “different.” And if you believe that, I have a bridge in Brooklyn that I would like to sell to you.

There are several problems in going to the electronic format. First, is the ever changing nature of the electronic media. Let me give you an example for my own career. I wrote my first scholarly paper in 1989 and stored it on a floppy disk—a real floppy disk. I still own the disk. It is sitting on a book shelf in my office, but I have no way of accessing the file. I wrote my doctoral dissertation/first book on an Apple Macintosh in 1996. I still own the computer, but it the printer died years ago and the computer screen no longer works.

I am not the only person facing this problem. “The first files I produced on a computer, in the 1970s, were stored on Radio Shack audiotape cassettes,” James Fallows of The Atlantic observed several years ago. “After that, I used a computer with eight-inch floppy disks. The book I wrote twenty-five years ago using that computer still looks fine—but the interview notes for it, which I “saved” on those big old disks, I might just as well have burned. For all practical purposes, there is no way for me to get at them anymore—nor at other information that over the years I’ve lodged on 5.25-inch disks, small archival high-density tapes, some varieties of Zip drives, and other media that my current computers can’t handle.” Fortunately, for me my research is all on paper.

Printed books might be old school media, but they do last for decades. That is something worth considering. Do you really want to spend seven years on a book length project and have it published electronically, only to see it disappear in eleven years? Probably not.

Second, there is a real question about the long-term durability of electronic publishing. Even if formats survive and remain accessible, the question is how long will the machinery remain operational. In 1859, English astronomer Richard Carrington observed a solar storm that produced huge flares and massive amounts of radiation. Eighteen hours later, the “Carrington event” shut down telegraph systems, and produced power surges that started fires at a number of telegraph stations. The event brought global communication to a halt for days. When telegraphs began operating again, there was so much electromagnetic energy in the air, that there was no need for the cables to be plugged into their power sources. The event also incapacitated international travel and trade. With all that radiation in the air, compasses pointed everywhere but north. For a brief period, sailors at sea returned to celestial navigation. That was the limit, though. Power grids, satellites, computers, the internet, television, radio, and microprocessors had not been developed, so many other parts of society never felt the impact of this storm.

The thing to note is that solar weather is cyclical. Over the course of the next century, there is no question that there will be another storm along the lines of the Carrington event. In 2003 the “Halloween Space Weather Storms,” a series of storms that equaled only twenty percent of the Carrington event, caused power surges and blackouts in northern Europe, shut down global positioning satellites, forced the rerouting of commercial air traffic, and blocked radio communication. The real issue is what will stronger storms due to electronic information storage systems. I do not know, but it will be probably be bad. What I can say with a lot more assurance is that it will do little to a printed book.

Even if I am wrong about the environmental challenge, there is still the problem about the format itself. Despite what people think digital information fades. The data is stored with tiny magnetic charges, and sooner or later those charges weaken and corrupt which eliminates the data stored on discs and hard drives.

Fallows interviewed Librarian of Congress James Billington on this topic and asked if there was a historical precedent for this type of loss. “Of course!” Billington replied. “The library at Alexandria.” He is referring to the burning of the Royal Library in Alexandria, Egypt, sometime after the Roman conquest of Egypt. The library operated under the patronage of the Ptolemaic dynasty, the Greek royal family that ruled Egypt for roughly 300 years, and turned the library into the major source of knowledge in the ancient Mediterranean world. The librarian added: “I’ll be frank, that is a major haunting thing for me about our library.” Sarantakes worries as well. So should you.

A third reason to stay away from e-books as a primary medium for publication is criminal activity. Right now it looks like iPads, Nooks, Kindles, etcetera are the next major “in thing” in electronic media. The criminal element has found ways to manipulate other electronic media such as the internet and e-mail. They use worms, Trojan horses, and botnets (a zombie army of computers controlled by others without their owners’ knowledge). With free downloadable applications for smart phones and public wi-fi hotspots it is only a matter of time before inventive criminals take advantage of these devices. While these attacks are going to be a problem for individual users, they will eventually infect databases. I have every expectation that users with these new electronic devices will put pressure on the database operators to make their products available to iPads, Nooks, and/or Kindles users and that will eventually lead to the infection of these electronic archives with some type of malware or virus. What kind of damage could hackers do our record of information, if they manage to degrade accessibility to electronically published books. Think I am exaggerating; think no one would attack something as benign as a depository of electronic books. Well, I am sure Sony thought that way until a week ago before its computer game network got attacked. The fact that people will be charged something to download electronic information makes these databases useful targets, and I am sure the criminal element can find other usages for them, even if I cannot.

If electronic publishing is so bad, why are people moving in this direction? The answer: short term thinking. Electronic publishing has been good for academic journals. It has made it possible for readers to buy copies of individual articles and smaller journals are more accessible as part of database bundles. Librarians for all the rhetoric we hear about having the coursework and training on budgeting issues make some fairly predictable decisions. They try to stretch their money and acquire as much as possible even if it is not what they need. For example, there is a journal that focuses on math history. I taught at school where the library subscribed to the journal as part of a package even though no one at the school in either the history or math departments worked in that field. Electronic publishing is cheaper than print since there is no need for ink or paper, and the price makes electronic books more attractive to librarians than traditional ones on paper.

Don’t get me wrong, electronic publishing is a great supplement to traditional print, but not as a replacement. For all the talk of going to a paperless society, electrons seem to be producing more paper rather than less. A perfect example is that there is more paper in the Reagan Presidential Library for 1988 than there is for 1981. The reason: computers were more available in 1988 than they were in 1981, making it easier for the White House staff to generate written records. All they had to do was hit the print button.

So, what is a scholar to do? The easiest thing to do is to refuse to publish in the electronic format. That, though, is easier said than done. I have four books in print and three are available electronically. I made mistakes in signing publishing contracts, but the book that has sold the best is the one that is not available in electronic format. I am currently looking to place three more manuscripts and am going to hold fast on the electronic issue. Go figure. At this point in my career, I am in a position where I can walk away from a situation. That is easy to say, but difficult to do. Scholars trying to publish their first book, might feel more pressure to compromise, but it is incumbent on you to take these stands. It is in your long term interests.

Administrative Post 13

2011-05-03T13:28:00.000-04:00

The blog will return on May 5 as promised with all new entries. Sorry for the vacation, but it was simply unavoidable. Small changes have taken place during this holiday, though. Some typos have been fixed and a new search engine was added along with an index feature at the bottom of each essay.

Administrative Post 12

2011-03-14T14:52:00.002-04:00

Because of a series of projects at work, I am having to take a short blog holiday. No new postings until May 5. Several important blogs will follow in May. I will not be entirely on vacation from the blog during that time. I will be correcting small errors in the text. I am also adding features. For example, I am in the process of adding an index at the bottom of each posting.

Blog LXXVII (77): Honors to the Blog, Part IV

2011-02-28T18:15:00.009-05:00

I know people are reading the blog, the little ticker on the right side of the screen tells me so, but every once in a while people actually write about this blog, which makes me feel good. Recently the website: selloutyoursoul.com, which is about leaving academia, had an exchange in which the webmaster of the site, quoted a letter to him that had several nice things to say about "In the Service of Clio." Here is a section from that post, which quotes the letter:

"One my favourite blogs is 'In the Service of Clio' (http://sarantakes.blogspot.com/). Nick Sarantakes, a diplomatic historian at the U.S. Naval College, discusses the historical profession and career management. He essentially walks potential students through the process: applications, grad school, career planning and publishing. He features different experiences through guest posts from those within and without the tenured system. There was a lengthy series discussing adjuncts. He has also looked at alternative career options for historians and recently presented at AHA on 'Careers in History: The Variety of the Profession.'

"As a recent history grad, who has just applied for a master of strategic studies, this blog not only deals with the painful reality of academic life but also discusses the
discipline’s problems and encourages students to look outside academia. One of my favourite posts
(http://sarantakes.blogspot.com/2010/05/blog-xlix-debate.html) is a string of emails in his department discussing whether a student should pursue a Ph.D in international affairs.

I agree with one professor’s statement, 'In the current market, I would not recommend seeking a Ph.D. at any but the best programs because the top five or so programs already produce enough Ph.D.s to fill all the available openings each year. True, you could go to work for the government, if you have marketable skills (foreign languages are crucial), but then why get a Ph.D.? Under no circumstances does it make sense to fund the program yourself, with work or loans or whatever–that is almost a certain road to poverty.” I couldn’t put it better: if there’s full funding and career prospects, grad school might make sense; if not, don’t waste your life.'"

While this is directed at PhD’s the same goes for a Master’s degree. If you love the subject, then go for it. But realize that it is a personal journey, not a career investment. If you like, you could take 50,000 dollars and tour Europe, and then find a job in a few years. Resume-wise, it wouldn’t make that much of a difference. I am being ironic, but not too far off base.Short answer, the money and time won’t pay a big enough return in your career. Do it to learn, but just remember that you will be in the same position career-option wise with a BA as you would be with a MA or PhD. Lots of school, but no skills in a specific industry.

Sorry to be such a negative voice.

James
from Selloutyoursoul.com

Blog LXXVI (76): Help on the Job Hunt

2011-02-18T22:35:00.009-05:00

I have listed a number of web sites in previous entries to this blog on where people can go to look for jobs. I realized that will this information might be helpful, the fact that it was spread out over several entries was not helpful. So, I have included web sites that the history Ph.D. should consult if they are considering a job outside of a traditional history department. These web sites include jobs in related fields like historic preservation and public history as well as other fields like journalism. Hope this helps:

American Association of Museums Job Headquarters Section
http://www.aam-us.org/aviso/index.cfm

The National Council on Public History
http://ncph.org/cms/careers-training/jobs/

PreserveNet Job Board
http://www.preservenet.cornell.edu/employ/index.cfm

PreservationDirectory.com
http://www.preservationdirectory.com/PreservationBlogs/ArticleListings.aspx?catid=3

PreservationDirectory.com Facebook Page
http://www.facebook.com/pages/PreservationDirectorycom/182062916596

The Association of Documentary Editing Job Listings
http://www.documentaryediting.org/jobs.html

The Society of American Archivisits Online Career Center
http://www2.archivists.org/careers

USAJobs.gov (federal government)
http://www.usajobs.gov/

The Special Libraries Association Career Center
http://www.sla.org/careers/

Association of Research Libraries Career Resources
http://www.arl.org/resources/careers/positions/index.shtml

Editor & Publisher
http://www.editorandpublisher.com/ep_jobs/

Sigma Delta Chi: The Society of Professional Journalists
https://www.spj.org/jobbank.asp

The Association for Alternative Newsweeklies
http://www.altweeklies.com/aan/Directories/Jobs

National Education Writers Association
http://www.ewa.org/site/PageServer?pagename=resources_jobcenter

The Association of Health Care Journalists
http://www.healthjournalism.org/prof-dev-jobs.php

National Association of Science Writers
https://www.nasw.org/jobs

National Conference of Editorial Writers
https://www.ncew.org/index.php?src=jobs&category=General

North American Agricultural Journalists
http://www.naaj.net/jobs

Society of American Business Editors and Writers
http://sabew.org/resources/jobs/

Society of Environmental Journalists
http://www.sej.org/library/jobs/overview

The Religion Newswriters Association
http://www.religionwriters.com/tools-resources/resume-bank

SportsJournalists.com
http://www.sportsjournalists.com/

Journalismjobs.com
http://www.journalismjobs.com/

AMFMjobs.com
http://www.amfmjobs.com/

TVjobs.com
http://www.tvjobs.com/

The Poytner Institute
http://careers.poynter.org/search.cfm

Associated Press
https://careers.ap.org/index.html

Gannett
http://www.gannett.com/career/findajob.htm

Cox
http://www.coxnewspapers.coxnewsweb.com/cgi-bin/coxjobs/openings.cgi?sortby=posted&orderby=desc

The Tribune Company
http://www.tribune.com/employment/index.html

The Washington Post Company
http://www.washpostco.com/phoenix.zhtml?c=62487&p=irol-jobs

The Historical Research Associates, Incorporated
http://www.hrassoc.com/page.aspx?Source=About&menu=Current+Openings

The History Factory
http://www.historyfactory.com/index.aspx?sectionid=12

State and Local Government Jobs
http://www.50statejobs.com/

The American Association for State and Local History
http://www.aaslh.org/jobsonline.htm

H-Net Public History Jobs
http://www.h-net.org/jobs/search_results.php?restrict=1&status=Open&cat=55

The Chronicle of Higher Education: Orgainzations other than Colleges
http://chronicle.com/jobCategory/Orgainzations-other-than/176

American Library Association
http://joblist.ala.org/

LibGig.com Jobs
http://www.libgig.com/

The Chronicle of Higher Education: Museum Jobs
http://chronicle.com/jobCateory/Museums/192/

American Association of Museums
http://www.aam-us.org/aviso/index.com/

Global Academic Jobs
http://www.university-directory.eu/

European Academic Jobs
http://www.acacdemicjobseu.com/

Jobs.ac.uk (Britain and Commenwealth)
http://www.jobs.ac.uk/

Korean Academic Jobs
http://www.hibrain.net/

Times Higher Education Supplement
http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/jobs_home.asp

Canadian Association of University Teachers Bulletin
http://www.academicwork.ca/

Australian University Jobs
http://www.unijobs.com.au/

Blog LXXV (75): An AHA Video

2011-02-02T10:44:00.010-05:00

The AHA did record our session, and apparently all the others. They posted them on YouTube.com. Below are the links to Session 3. Before you click on them, you should know that we had problems with the microphone--our feed was going into another session and vice-versa. The video sounds adequate to me, but you might not feel that way. It also appears that there was no real camera work, so it pretty much stays as a wide shot of the six of us. I am sitting at the end of the table; opposite from the podium. The AHA has a YouTube channel and they broke up the recording into five parts. Enjoy.

part 1
http://www.youtube.com/user/historiansorg#p/u/16/Qb9Dx4Zm9iQ

part 2
http://www.youtube.com/user/historiansorg#p/u/15/wNukJs0a2ok

part 3
http://www.youtube.com/user/historiansorg#p/u/14/xj7jJoToHxM

part 4
http://www.youtube.com/user/historiansorg#p/u/13/7ydlZSl40XA

part 5
http://www.youtube.com/user/historiansorg#p/u/12/p3WWOEjMg3c

Blog LXXIV (74): Another Video

2011-01-31T07:45:00.006-05:00

Here is another one of those xtranormal videos. This one is "Why you Shouldn't Become an Archivist." According to the comments that are posted on the hosting site, this video has a lot of truth to it as did the ones that were posted in Blog LIX. The best satire always uses the truth. Enjoy.

Blog LXXIII (73): The Disposable Academic

2011-01-24T08:08:00.010-05:00

At the AHA meeting, I stated that there is only a 16 percent chance of a Ph.D. finding a job as a faculty member. That statistic comes from this powerful article that appeared in the December 16 issue of The Economist. It is entitled: "Doctoral Degrees - The Disposable Academic Why Doing a PhD is Often a Waste of Time". This article makes for grim reading. It shows that the glut in Ph.D.s is not limited to the field of history or the United States:

On the evening before All Saints' Day in 1517, Martin Luther nailed 95 theses to the door of a church in Wittenberg. In those days a thesis was simply a position one wanted to argue. Luther, an Augustinian friar, asserted that Christians could not buy their way to heaven. Today a doctoral thesis is both an idea and an account of a period of original research. Writing one is the aim of the hundreds of thousands of students who embark on a doctorate of philosophy (PhD) every year.

In most countries a PhD is a basic requirement for a career in academia. It is an introduction to the world of independent research - a kind of intellectual masterpiece, created by an apprentice in close collaboration with a supervisor. The requirements to complete one vary enormously between countries, universities and even subjects. Some students will first have to spend two years working on a master's degree or diploma. Some will receive a stipend; others will pay their own way. Some PhDs involve only research, some require classes and examinations and some require the student to teach undergraduates. A thesis can be dozens of pages in mathematics, or many hundreds in history. As a result, newly minted PhDs can be as young as their early 20s or world-weary forty-somethings.

One thing many PhD students have in common is dissatisfaction. Some describe their work as "slave labour". Seven-day weeks, ten-hour days, low pay and uncertain prospects are widespread. You know you are a graduate student, goes one quip, when your office is better decorated than your home and you have a favourite flavour of instant noodle. "It isn't graduate school itself that is discouraging," says one student, who confesses to rather enjoying the hunt for free pizza. "What's discouraging is realising the end point has been yanked out of reach."

Whining PhD students are nothing new, but there seem to be genuine problems with the system that produces research doctorates (the practical "professional doctorates" in fields such as law, business and medicine have a more obvious value). There is an oversupply of PhDs. Although a doctorate is designed as training for a job in academia, the number of PhD positions is unrelated to the number of job openings. Meanwhile, business leaders complain about shortages of high-level skills, suggesting PhDs are not teaching the right things. The fiercest critics compare research doctorates to Ponzi or pyramid schemes.
Rich PickingsFor most of history even a first degree at a university was the privilege of a rich few, and many academic staff did not hold doctorates. But as higher education expanded after the second world war, so did the expectation that lecturers would hold advanced degrees. American universities geared up first: by 1970 America was producing just under a third of the world's university students and half of its science and technology PhDs (at that time it had only 6% of the global population). Since then America's annual output of PhDs has doubled, to 64,000.

Other countries are catching up. Between 1998 and 2006 the number of doctorates handed out in all OECD countries grew by 40%, compared with 22% for America. PhD production sped up most dramatically in Mexico, Portugal, Italy and Slovakia. Even Japan, where the number of young people is shrinking, churned out about 46% more PhDs. Part of that growth reflects the expansion of university education outside America. Richard Freeman, a labour economist at Harvard University, says that by 2006 America was enrolling just 12% of the world's students.

But universities have discovered that PhD students are cheap, highly motivated and disposable labour. With more PhD students they can do more research, and in some countries more teaching, with less money. A graduate assistant at Yale might earn $20,000 a year for nine months of teaching. The average pay of full professors in America was $109,000 in 2009-higher than the average for judges and magistrates.

Indeed, the production of PhDs has far outstripped demand for university lecturers. In a recent book, Andrew Hacker and Claudia Dreifus, an academic and a journalist, report that America produced more than 100,000 doctoral degrees between 2005 and 2009. In the same period there were just 16,000 new professorships. Using PhD students to do much of the undergraduate teaching cuts the number of full-time jobs. Even in Canada, where the output of PhD graduates has grown relatively modestly, universities conferred 4,800 doctorate degrees in 2007 but hired just 2,616 new full-time professors. Only a few fast-developing countries, such as Brazil and China, now seem short of PhDs.
A Short Course in Supply and DemandIn research the story is similar. PhD students and contract staff known as "postdocs", described by one student as "the ugly underbelly of academia", do much of the research these days. There is a glut of postdocs too. Dr Freeman concluded from pre-2000 data that if American faculty jobs in the life sciences were increasing at 5% a year, just 20% of students would land one. In Canada 80% of postdocs earn $38,600 or less per year before tax - the average salary of a construction worker. The rise of the postdoc has created another obstacle on the way to an academic post. In some areas five years as a postdoc is now a prerequisite for landing a secure full-time job.

These armies of low-paid PhD researchers and postdocs boost universities', and therefore countries', research capacity. Yet that is not always a good thing. Brilliant, well-trained minds can go to waste when fashions change. The post-Sputnik era drove the rapid growth in PhD physicists that came to an abrupt halt as the Vietnam war drained the science budget. Brian Schwartz, a professor of physics at the City University of New York, says that in the 1970s as many as 5,000 physicists had to find jobs in other areas.

In America the rise of PhD teachers' unions reflects the breakdown of an implicit contract between universities and PhD students: crummy pay now for a good academic job later. Student teachers in public universities such as the University of Wisconsin-Madison formed unions as early as the 1960s, but the pace of unionisation has increased recently. Unions are now spreading to private universities; though Yale and Cornell, where university administrators and some faculty argue that PhD students who teach are not workers but apprentices, have resisted union drives. In 2002 New York University was the first private university to recognise a PhD teachers' union, but stopped negotiating with it three years later.

In some countries, such as Britain and America, poor pay and job prospects are reflected in the number of foreign-born PhD students. Dr Freeman estimates that in 1966 only 23% of science and engineering PhDs in America were awarded to students born outside the country. By 2006 that proportion had increased to 48%. Foreign students tend to tolerate poorer working conditions, and the supply of cheap, brilliant, foreign labour also keeps wages down.

Proponents of the PhD argue that it is worthwhile even if it does not lead to permanent academic employment. Not every student embarks on a PhD wanting a university career and many move successfully into private-sector jobs in, for instance, industrial research. That is true; but drop-out rates suggest that many students become dispirited. In America only 57% of doctoral students will have a PhD ten years after their first date of enrolment. In the humanities, where most students pay for their own PhDs, the figure is 49%. Worse still, whereas in other subject areas students tend to jump ship in the early years, in the humanities they cling like limpets before eventually falling off. And these students started out as the academic cream of the nation. Research at one American university found that those who finish are no cleverer than those who do not. Poor supervision, bad job prospects or lack of money cause them to run out of steam.

Even graduates who find work outside universities may not fare all that well. PhD courses are so specialised that university careers offices struggle to assist graduates looking for jobs, and supervisors tend to have little interest in students who are leaving academia. One OECD study shows that five years after receiving their degrees, more than 60% of PhDs in Slovakia and more than 45% in Belgium, the Czech Republic, Germany and Spain were still on temporary contracts. Many were postdocs. About one-third of Austria's PhD graduates take jobs unrelated to their degrees. In Germany 13% of all PhD graduates end up in lowly occupations. In the Netherlands the proportion is 21%.
A Very Slim PremiumPhD graduates do at least earn more than those with a bachelor's degree. A study in the Journal of Higher Education Policy and Management by Bernard Casey shows that British men with a bachelor's degree earn 14% more than those who could have gone to university but chose not to. The earnings premium for a PhD is 26%. But the premium for a master's degree, which can be accomplished in as little as one year, is almost as high, at 23%. In some subjects the premium for a PhD vanishes entirely. PhDs in maths and computing, social sciences and languages earn no more than those with master's degrees. The premium for a PhD is actually smaller than for a master's degree in engineering and technology, architecture and education. Only in medicine, other sciences, and business and financial studies is it high enough to be worthwhile. Over all subjects, a PhD commands only a 3% premium over a master's degree.

Dr Schwartz, the New York physicist, says the skills learned in the course of a PhD can be readily acquired through much shorter courses. Thirty years ago, he says, Wall Street firms realised that some physicists could work out differential equations and recruited them to become "quants", analysts and traders. Today several short courses offer the advanced maths useful for finance. "A PhD physicist with one course on differential equations is not competitive," says Dr Schwartz.

Many students say they are pursuing their subject out of love, and that education is an end in itself. Some give little thought to where the qualification might lead. In one study of British PhD graduates, about a third admitted that they were doing their doctorate partly to go on being a student, or put off job hunting. Nearly half of engineering students admitted to this. Scientists can easily get stipends, and therefore drift into doing a PhD. But there are penalties, as well as benefits, to staying at university. Workers with "surplus schooling"-more education than a job requires-are likely to be less satisfied, less productive and more likely to say they are going to leave their jobs.

Academics tend to regard asking whether a PhD is worthwhile as analogous to wondering whether there is too much art or culture in the world. They believe that knowledge spills from universities into society, making it more productive and healthier. That may well be true; but doing a PhD may still be a bad choice for an individual.

The interests of academics and universities on the one hand and PhD students on the other are not well aligned. The more bright students stay at universities, the better it is for academics. Postgraduate students bring in grants and beef up their supervisors' publication records. Academics pick bright undergraduate students and groom them as potential graduate students. It isn't in their interests to turn the smart kids away, at least at the beginning. One female student spoke of being told of glowing opportunities at the outset, but after seven years of hard slog she was fobbed off with a joke about finding a rich husband.

Monica Harris, a professor of psychology at the University of Kentucky, is a rare exception. She believes that too many PhDs are being produced, and has stopped admitting them. But such unilateral academic birth control is rare. One Ivy-League president, asked recently about PhD oversupply, said that if the top universities cut back others will step in to offer them instead.

Noble PursuitsMany of the drawbacks of doing a PhD are well known. Your correspondent was aware of them over a decade ago while she slogged through a largely pointless PhD in theoretical ecology. As Europeans try to harmonise higher education, some institutions are pushing the more structured learning that comes with an American PhD.

The organisations that pay for research have realised that many PhDs find it tough to transfer their skills into the job market. Writing lab reports, giving academic presentations and conducting six-month literature reviews can be surprisingly unhelpful in a world where technical knowledge has to be assimilated quickly and presented simply to a wide audience. Some universities are now offering their PhD students training in soft skills such as communication and teamwork that may be useful in the labour market. In Britain a four-year NewRoutePhD claims to develop just such skills in graduates.

Measurements and incentives might be changed, too. Some university departments and academics regard numbers of PhD graduates as an indicator of success and compete to produce more. For the students, a measure of how quickly those students get a permanent job, and what they earn, would be more useful. Where penalties are levied on academics who allow PhDs to overrun, the number of students who complete rises abruptly, suggesting that students were previously allowed to fester.

Many of those who embark on a PhD are the smartest in their class and will have been the best at everything they have done. They will have amassed awards and prizes. As this year's new crop of graduate students bounce into their research, few will be willing to accept that the system they are entering could be designed for the benefit of others, that even hard work and brilliance may well not be enough to succeed, and that they would be better off doing something else. They might use their research skills to look harder at the lot of the disposable academic. Someone should write a thesis about that.

Blog LXXII (72): Reflections on the AHA

2011-01-20T03:41:00.006-05:00

I had a good AHA conference. Only the second time that has happened. One of the main reasons is because I stayed away from the job center where all the interviews were taking place.

The good people at AHA central have spent some time collecting links to a number of blogs that discussed the 125th annual meeting in Boston. I spent an hour reading them and learned a lot. Most confirmed my view that the more you avoid the interviews the better. A few blogs were extremely informative, many were a waste of time. Several mentioned my session, which makes me feel we did something useful, but then a lot of the points we were trying to make do not seem to have gotten understood, which gives you pause. All four of my previous postings for this blog are listed. That development is gratifying. Someone seems to paying attention to what gets discussed on this blog.

I have been thinking long and hard about the problems facing the history profession. The biggest issue in my mind is the job market. All other issues seem fairly insignificant in comparison. Bluntly put: supply exceeds demand—it has for over a decade—and the supply seems to be increasing just as the demand is shrinking. This issue will get better before it gets worse. There are many history Ph.D.s already in the pipeline who will be finishing their degrees in the next year or two and problems in the national economy, which are the systemic cause for the decline in jobs, are not going to get fixed anytime soon.

What is a historian to do? Officials of the AHA does not seem to have a ready response. To be fair it is not a problem of their making, but the response of the leadership of the profession to this crisis seems to be lame. (I will define the “leadership of the profession” to be the elected officers of the AHA and the faculty at the leading history departments—I will leave that one a little vague on purpose.)

Many of the faculty at leading institutions actually seem to be more of the problem than the solution. It was well clear by the mid-1990s that history departments across the country had admitted too many students in the late 1980s and early 1990s. The job market was not particularly good back then—I know I was looking for a job at the time—but they continued to admit students.

Why? Why would departments do that? The short answer: it was—and still is—in the short term institutional interests of departments to have strong graduate programs even if their were no jobs for those students once they graduated. Having grad students serve as teaching assistants or as instructors was how departments managed to honor the low teaching loads they offered to their faculty and yet how they managed to meet their undergraduate teaching obligations. The surplus and the use of adjuncts also allows departmental faculty to enjoy low teaching loads. I also suspect the history faculty at prestige schools expected that their reputation would trump the numbers. (“We’re Stanford, damn it! Our students are better and will always be able to get jobs.”)

The comments of Todd A. Diacon, deputy chancellor at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, have been weighing on me. Diacon, a distinguished historian in his own right, pointed out that the number of history departments with Ph.D. programs in the country is not sustainable because faculty in these programs often carry light teaching loads, with the extra classes transferred to graduate students and adjuncts.

The leadership of the AHA seems to think the organization is fairly weak and has little power beyond shinning a light on certain problems or coming up with best practice guidelines. Some of the other bloggers have made a good point that developing guidelines has little impact and simply saying things are bad is not all that helpful.

I agree, and have been thinking up a series of ideas on how to solve these problems. I have several ideas in mind and I am basically trying to figure out ways both to decrease the supply and increase the demand for the history Ph.D. I am currently thinking through the positives and negatives in each proposal and trying to think through the objections to each idea in order to make them stronger. I am going to run them by a few friends before I announce them to the rest of the world. I think they will work, but I want to be realistic; if they do work, it is still going to take time (and by “time” I mean several years) for them to kick in and have their full impact. Finally, if you do not like what I have to propose, I hope you will see these ideas as a constructive effort to offer some type of solution to problems facing the profession. If you disagree, I hope you will offer positive contributions to solve a serious problem facing the history business.

Blog LXXI (71): The AHA is Here: Day 4

2011-01-12T12:11:00.008-05:00

Sunday, January 9: the last day of the AHA conference.

It snowed through the night. A lot more snow on the ground.

Another early morning workout. The hotel fitness center was full of historians.

I was at the book display when it opened at 9 a.m. Actually was there ten minutes before and spent some time chatting with people from my session. There was a nice crowd of people waiting to get in and I was joking that was like the mad dash of the brides when Filene’s Basement has their yearly bridal sale. That is an exaggeration, but it looked like it a little. I was one of the worst. I spent two hours in the ballroom and got book after book after book. I started acquiring books on the first day of the conference, but Sunday morning was the big day. One of the major reasons I go to the AHA is to acquire books at a steep discount. The book sellers go to the meeting for two reasons. They want their products to be adopted in courses, which is why they give texts to faculty at a huge discount. The main reason booksellers are at the meeting is to meet with authors and potential authors.

All told I spent roughly $200 and walked away with 75 books. That came down to $2.60 per book. If I bought all these books at a Barnes & Noble I would have paid $2200. Now, not all of these books were for me. Fifteen are books that I acquired for review in Presidential Studies Quarterly, where I am one of the book review editors.

After finishing with the book fair, I went to a session entitled: “The Public’s ‘Need to Know’ and National Security.” It was interesting session on the standing of the Foreign Relations of the United States series, a historical editing project the Historian’s Office at the State Department is responsible for producing. The FRUS series started in 1861 and is very important to diplomatic historians. The session was broadcast live on C-Span. Some of the stuff that got discussed was not new, but some of it was quite interesting. The recent Wikileaks incident was a topic. The consensus of the panel was that the information that was released was fairly insignificant. The exact word used was "chatter." Mitch Lerner of The Ohio State University gave a talk on a survey he did of diplomatic historians and their opinions on the state of the FRUS series. I was one of the people that Lerner contacted, and in the question/answer session I asked about the perception in the profession about the current quality of the series. It was a really good session, and a good way to end the AHA conference.

Blog LXX (70): The AHA is Here: Day 3

2011-01-11T17:15:00.011-05:00

My apologies for the delay in posting this blog. Most of it was written on January 8, but I was not able to get it posted in a timely fashion.

Still snowing. Boston is covered in a light blanket of white. Started the morning with a work out in the fitness center of the hotel. It was full of historians.

Turned on the television and discovered HistoriansTV. Basically it is a cable network channel about the conference and it is broadcast to everyone staying in the conference hotels. I learned that there are a 150 job interviews taking place. That is not that many particularly when you consider information from the AHA study that I mentioned yesterday. There were 569 jobs advertised in the AHA newsletter this year. The fewest number of listings in the last 10 years. Jobs listings in the newsletter dropped 29.4 percent in 2009-2010 and 23.8 in 2008-2009.

It gets worse. In 2009, history departments awarded 989 degrees, a nine-year high. The year before it was 969. Now here is where it goes from bad to worse: in response to budge shortfalls departments are instituting a number of cost cutting measures: they are eliminating courses, increasing class sizes, and using even more part-timers instructors. Put another way: supply is increasing at the same time that demand is decreasing.

And it won’t get better any time soon. According to the report, "the number of faculty [in history departments] approaching retirement age in the next 10 years is reaching the lowest level in 30 years." Put another way: "even if there were no hiring freezes to factor into the equation, it is clear that over the next 10 to 15 years the discipline will not be generating as many jobs from retiring faculty as it has in the recent past."

The report did not offer an actions that departments, the AHA as an organization, or individual historians can take. It simply stated, "Most history doctoral students are being trained for an academic job market that is now beset by crises," the report says. "Departments should begin to carefully reflect on the type of training they are providing their students and the number of students they are admitting to their programs."

In a later interview, Robert B. Townsend, the primary author of this study, gave, he said he had no advice to offer to a new Ph.D. on the job market. He said these scholars should think about "how long it is reasonable to linger on in part-time and postdoc positions." The numbers suggest that after three years the odds of getting a job drop. "Typically, our advice is that after about three years, your odds of getting on to the tenure track go down significantly," he remarked. What we do not know is if attitudes about such historians will change in light of the exceptionally poor job market faced by those going on the market now.

Went to a conference on the academic job market. The participants were not offering much useful news and there were only 25 people in the room. The question and answer session was more useful. One member of the crowd was Todd A. Diacon, deputy chancellor at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. “We don’t wake up every day thinking, ‘How are we going to stick it to the humanities?’ ” he explained. “We have to face a very different reality.” Diacon stated that the “either/or” view of the world that pits academics against administrators is simplistic and misleading. Many administrators who are trying to measure productivity and maximize efficiency in higher education are trained scholars. “The enemy is us,” he said. Diacon added that there are too many universities with Ph.D. programs. These programs are extremely expensive due to the light teaching loads that they mandate and that he expects to see dozens shut down in the next decade, given the current economic environment. History just does not bring in the same money that the sciences do.

To me that sounds like market forces might solve the glut, but it does little for those currently on the job market.

One very frustrated grad student asked for specifics on where to find the non-traditional jobs that everyone was discussing. I stood up and made several comments. First, I told everyone about this blog and the listing of websites with jobs. Needless to say, after the conference, I was flooded with people wanting the address. Second, in response to Sarah Maza, the incoming vice president of the professional division’s request for ideas, I suggested that the AHA begin seriously making efforts to broaden its leadership. Prior to 1945, the organization had people serve as president who were political scientists, anthropologists, archeologists, and/or professional writers. Some like Alfred Thayer Mahan and Theodore Roosevelt did not even have a Ph.D. The organization needs to bring in public historians, archivists, and others the way it once did. This is the first step in broadening the organization’s knowledge of other job out there in the history business. This idea went over fairly well.

Talked with a friend of mine from grad school. He is at a research university that is a member of the Atlantic Coast Conference. They were doing a search for a historian of Early Republic America. They had over 100 applicants. I asked how they narrowed down that list. He explained that about 60 were historians of Colonial America, but were applying for the job, thinking they could do this other period. He suspected they could, but they wanted someone who could do the Early Republic, and excluded all these colonial era specialists.

Blog LXIX (69): The AHA is Here: Day 2

2011-01-08T07:50:00.009-05:00

Yesterday was an average second day at the AHA. The problem I (and many others) with the AHA is that most of the sessions seem irrelevant to my interests. History is simply too big and too diverse for there to be an organization for the entire profession.

Went to a session on publishing: “‘Beyond Chaps and Maps’: A Roundtable on Publishing International History.” Kathleen McDermott of Harvard University Press said “History is a big selling category to the outside world.” I also learned that books that cross disciplines are difficult for publishers to market and sell. They tend to like books that fit solidly in a category. Interdisciplinary work is difficult because it can often be peripheral to the main issues in several different fields. A book needs to be central to the debate or area of concern in some field. Susan Ferber of Oxford University noted that there are so many specializations in certain historical subfields, that they are splitting. In this current economic environment, that is not a wise move. The thing that impressed her the most of late was the debate that took place at the 2009 annual meeting of the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations about changing the name of the organization and journal. That organization has managed to maintain a big tent approach and is one of the most civil and collegial learned societies in the history profession. As a diplomatic historian, that made me feel good.

Spent a lot of time at the book fair, grabbing books. Ran into several old friends. Had some interesting conversations—typical AHA stuff. A friend asked about my session and then talked about an article in Inside Higher Ed that discussed academic employment. It sounds like an interesting article and I will dig it up for this blog.

Went back to my room and worked out.

Had an interesting conversation with a friend on the way to a reception. His university is doing a search for a Latin Americanist. They had 140 applicants and are interviewing 15 at the conference. I asked how did they reduce that number. He said each committee member took a third of the applicants and weeded them down. First, they would only look at people with a Ph.D. No ABDs. Second, they were looking for true Latin Americanists, not someone who did U.S.-Latin America—they have a diplomatic historian and they need a real Latin Americanist. Third, the decided that they would look only at people that had already had some type of teaching experience. The problem they were facing is that none of the candidates had given a bad interview. I include this little incident in hopes of giving readers of this blog a better idea of what happens in the interview process and how tough it is to get a job in history.

I then spent time at the reception for the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations. A good group and I saw a lot of old friends. I then went to a very small reception afterwards for AHA book prize winners and the leadership of the AHA. (I was invited as the chair of an AHA book prize committee. Very good food, but the session seemed reflective of the problems with the AHA—there was little mingling. People talked to those in their little niches.

Started snowing last night.

I had dinner in Boston at Mother Anna’s, an Italian place in Boston’s North End. There were about 25 other diplomatic historians in attendance. We had a good conversation about university administration with Randall Woods, a former dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Arkansas. Woods, myself, William Hitchcock of the University of Virginia, and Fredrik Logevall of Cornell University were at one end of a long table and our conversation also discussed publishing. Basically books are not selling that well—which is hardly surprising given the current economic environment.

Blog LXVIII (68): The AHA is Here: Day 1

2011-01-07T23:44:00.013-05:00

The 125th annual meeting of the American Historical Association started yesterday, January 6, 2011. The next couple of blog entries will focus on the AHA conference, it strengths and weaknesses.

The conference is being held at the Hynes Convention Center in downtown Boston. The AHA seems to like cold, chilly places with San Diego being a notable exception. While the weather is okay considering the season, the location is a good one. The Convention center is connected to a number of hotels and offers a number of decent eateries. There are also good places within walking distance where you can get a real meal, if you want.

My AHA started with arrival at the hotel and a quick valet of auto and the checking of my bags. I taught in the morning at the NWC and arrived worried about making the start of my session. As it was I was the first person to walk in the room. Our session started on time. The session was recorded by the AHA but C-Span was not there. We had 73 people in the room, which was the best turnout I have had in the three times I have been on the AHA conference program.

Robert Kane of Air University began his talk by discussing his work as a unit historian for the U.S. Air Force. He was the only person in our session to use power point in his presentation. The military is civilianizing its historian program. There are 220 of these positions in the Air Force. What do they do? They research and write the annual histories of the units to which they are assigned—think of this as a year end report. They also do oral histories with unit commanders, and collect and maintain unit documents. The jobs are at air bases around the country and the pay ranges from $38,000-$100,000. There is a cost of living adjustment as well (if a job in South Dakota pays $50,000, it will pay much more in Washington, D.C. where the cost of living is more). The job does not require specialization in military history—all fields are welcome and if you do not have a Ph.D., the service will pay for you to obtain one.

Kevin Allen from the Massachusetts Department of Conservation and Recreation then spoke. He might be considered a public historian, but he specifically works in historic preservation. His job is to preserve historical buildings, which are abundant in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. “These buildings are the primary documents,” he remarked. Historic preservation is a bit fuzzy as a field. It does not have a specific career track. It requires skills from a number of different fields including history, architecture, and the law to name just a few. It is a growing field.

The next speaker was Steven Luckert, a curator at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum. “If you are a historian, it’s a great place to be,” he remarked. As a curator he reaches a huge audience; 2 million people visit the museum a year. Like many museums, the Holocaust Memorial has an archive, which allows him to do historical research in primary sources. Museums sponsor speaker series and conferences, which leads to “fruitful discussions” with professional colleagues. Most curators are historians. “It’s an extremely creative process,” he said. He also called it the “most rewarding job I’ve every had.”

I spoke next. My presentation was sweet and sour—actually the sour part came first. I said the problems historians faced was one of simple economics. Supply vastly exceeded demand with supply being people with a history Ph.D. and demand being jobs available for them. I cite statistics from an article in December 16, 2010 issue of The Economist. Overproduction of Ph.D.s was not limited to history. American universities produced 100,000 Ph.D.s in the last five years and there were only 16,000 jobs. That is to say there are jobs for only 16 percent of these newly minted scholars. The days of thinking that having a good degree from a good school would be enough to get you a job are over. There are probably less than five schools in the country that can take that attitude, and I pointed out that there are more than five schools in the Ivy League. (That got a few laughs). I created this blog to address these issue and many others , and made references to many of the on this blog about other careers not being discussed in this session. I then discussed working in the military school system, and recommended it highly.

Megan Sniffin-Marinoff, the University Archivist at Harvard University spoke next. She said being archivists are in the history business, they build history and they, not historians, are the ones that first find new documents. Being an archivist is fuzzy it is part library science and party history and people doing that work have backgrounds in both. For a long time, she was the only historian working among archivists. “It’s the history part of the job that keeps me going,” she explained. Her job now is primarily administrative and managerial as she has 23 people working for her. Public and private archives also work differently as they have different missions and purposes. Private archives are far more scholarly in nature, while public archives often have a mission of public accountability for state, local, and federal governments.

C. James Taylor of the Papers of John Adams project at the Massachusetts Historical Society spoke last. He said the job market situation today was worse than it had been when he finished his Ph.D. in the early 1970s. He stumbled into historical editing on accident. “I have never looked back.” He also noted that the history Ph.D. was the perfect type of degree and most projects require that credential. “You have been prepared for this kind of work.” Historical editing is still fairly new. The earliest projects date back to the 1940s, but most of the growth in the field started in the 1960s. Taylor said there were pluses and minuses to this type of work. One the positive side, the salaries are competitive and in some cases better than what faculty make; competition for these jobs is “keen” but nowhere near as savage as the jobs for a tenure track appointment. Finally, a published volume of historical papers will have a much longer shelf life than any academic monograph. “They go on to have a lasting impact.” The negatives to the job include having to keep regular office hours; work on a 12 month basis with no summer vacations; no tenure; and most of the projects operate on soft money, which is to say grants from private foundations, and state and federal governments. As a result, there is a constant need to show results. Taylor also said that academic historians also are condescending to historical editing staffs even if they are unemployed. Good research and writings skills are a must and a strong candidate needs to show that they can work as part of a team.

A healthy question and answer session followed. During this discussion, a number of the following job bank web sites were recommended for people looking for jobs in these non-traditional fields:

American Association of Museums Job Headquarters Section
http://www.aam-us.org/aviso/index.cfm

PreserveNet Job Board
http://www.preservenet.cornell.edu/employ/index.cfm

PreservationDirectory.com
http://www.preservationdirectory.com/PreservationBlogs/ArticleListings.aspx?catid=3

PreservationDirectory.com Facebook Page
http://www.facebook.com/pages/PreservationDirectorycom/182062916596

The Association of Documentary Editing Job Listings
http://www.documentaryediting.org/jobs.html

The Society of American Archivisits Online Career Center
http://www2.archivists.org/careers

USAJobs.gov (federal government)
http://www.usajobs.gov/

The Special Libraries Association Career Center
http://www.sla.org/careers/

Association of Research Libraries Career Resources
http://www.arl.org/resources/careers/positions/index.shtml

The rest of the first day as the typical AHA. I ran into a few old friends and colleagues. I also spent some time at the book display talking to the editor at Kansas about my next book. Overall, the leadership of the AHA still seems reluctant to address major problems facing the profession. The first conference in Boston proper was 1912 (there were two previous conferences in Cambridge) and the president of the AHA that year as Theodore Roosevelt. (You might have heard of him). His speech addressed discussed the marginalization of history in American society. He focused on the quality of writing of historical studies, which was a major factor in scholars not having an audience. He wanted scholars to realize that history is literature. His speech is still highly, highly relevant, because the situation has only gotten worse in the intervening 99 years. The other major issue facing the history business—as I have already stated—is the vast surplus of historians with a Ph.D. Tonight the president of the AHA, Barbara D. Metcalf of the University of California, Davis, emerita will be giving a talk entitled: “Islam and Power in Colonial India: The Making and Unmaking of a Muslim Prince(ss).” That talk is about as relevant to me as it is to you.

Blog LXVII (67): The AHA is Coming3

2010-12-16T10:41:00.066-05:00

Session 3 at the annual meeting of the American Historical Association looks to be interesting, to say the least. Who are the people that will make up this panel, entitled "Careers in History: The Variety of the Profession"? Glad you asked. The pannelists are the following:

Steven Luckert is a curator at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum . He holds a BA, MA, and a Ph.D. from Binghamton University. He is the author of The Art and Politics of Arthur Szyk.

Robert B. Kane holds a Ph.D. in history from the University of California at Los Angeles. He served in the U.S. Air Force, and retired as a Lieutenant Colonel. He then served as the deputy historian for the Air Armament Center, Eglin Air Force Base, Florida. Kane now works in the Organizational History Branch at the Air Force Historical Research Agency, located at Maxwell Air Force Base, Alabama. He is the author of Disobedience and Conspiracy in the German Army, 1918-45.

Megan Sniffin-Marinoff is the University Archivist of Harvard University. She holds a BS and MA from Boston University, and another MA from New York University. Before coming to Harvard, she was the head of special collections at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and was at Simmons College where she was the college archivist and then the director of the archives programs at the Simmons College Graduate School of Library and Information Science. She is a Fellow of the Society of American Archivists. This distinction is the highest honor the organization bestows on individual members.

C. James Taylor is the Editor-in-Chief of the Adams Paper Project at the Massachusetts Historical Society. Before that he served as co-editor of The Papers of Henry Laurens and was an associate research professor at the University of South Carolina.

Nicholas Evan Sarantakes is an associate professor of strategy and policy at the U.S. Naval War College. He holds a Ph.D. in history from the University of Southern California. He is the author of four books. He has also won five writing awards for his article work. He is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society. He is currently finishing work on a book about the making of the film Patton.

Kevin Allen lives in Somerville, Massachussets and manages the Massachusetts Department of Conservation and Recreation’s Historic Curatorship Program, a long-term leasing public-private partnership program. Allen received a Bachelor’s Degree in History and Film Production from the University of Colorado in 1994, and a Masters in History/Historic Preservation from the University of South Carolina in 1999. He currently serves on the Somerville Historic Preservation Commission. He has worked in the public history field for 14 years, having previously worked at the Smithsonian Institution, in the Planning Department for the City of Columbia, South Carolina, the North Carolina State Historic Preservation Office, and Wake County, North Carolina’s preservation Non-Profit.

Aaron W. Marrs is a historian at the U.S. Department of State. He earned his Ph.D. from the University of South Carolina and is the author of Railroads in the Old South: Pursuing Progress in a Slave Society. He is currently the chair of the American Historical Association's Graduate and Early Career Committee.

Blog LXVI (66): Honors to the Blog, Part III

2010-12-15T14:15:00.033-05:00

This blog continues to perform its mission in ways large and small. The people at AHA headquarters continue top appreciate the work done here. The "What We’re Reading" section of the blog referenced "In the Service of Clio" on December 9, 2010: A number of history departments have been king to this blog and have recommend this site as either a link on their website or on the page that their library staffs maintain for their history majors. These schools include: Ambrose University College, Temple University, University of Memphis, the Villanova University public history program, Villanova University, the Intute consortium (a combination of seven British universities: University of Birmingham, University of Bristol, Heriot-Watt University, The University of Manchester, Manchester Metropolitan University, University of Nottingham, and the University of Oxford), Kean University, Miami University, and Tulane University.

In December, 2009 Michael Creswell had his essay “Navigating the Graduate Admissions Process" published in the American Historical Association's newsletter, Perspectives on History. This article originally appeared as a "guest column" for "In the Service of Clio" back on April 16, 2009 as Blog VI. It has become something of a hit. A number of departments are linking to this essay on their web sites. Although these links are to the AHA's site rather than this blog, it is still a recognition for the work that this blog is doing. These history departments recognizing Creswell include the ones at: American University, Florida Gulf Coast University, University of North Carolina, Maxwell School of Syracuse University, Rhodes College, Taiwan Historian Network, University of South Florida, Florida State University, Texas Tech University, California State University at Fullerton, Park University, and the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay.

Blogger.com is providing statistics for blog operators. According to their charting, which only goes back to May of this year, this blog has had an international audience. The map below documents some the origins of many visitors to this blog:

Blog LXI: The AHA is Coming Nicholas Evan Sarantakes gears up for the AHA’s 125th Annual Meeting and for session 3, “Careers in History: The Variety of the Profession,” profiled earlier this week on AHA today, and which he will be participating in.

According to their statistics, most of the visitors come from the United States, but they are coming from many other places as well:

United States 5176
United Kingdom 737
Netherlands 614
Germany 47
Canada 44
India 278
Russia 256
Turkey 126
Latvia 84
Ukraine 43

Blog LXV (65): The AHA is Coming, The AHA is Coming

2010-12-14T08:28:00.017-05:00

Some one at AHA central must like me. Last week the people that run the AHA blog designated my panel at the annual meeting as the "Session of the Week." I must say, they have good taste. You can find the essay on their blog site. I have also included the blog entry in its entirety, including links and graphics on this posting:

December 06, 2010

Session of the Week: Careers in History

What can you dowith a history degree? More importantly, what can youdo with a history degree if you don’t want to teach?

History majors have diverse job options outside of academia. Learn from history professionals in a range of fields in session 3, Careers in History: The Variety of the Profession. This roundtable session, sponsored by the Graduate and Early Career Committee, brings together historians who work in preservation, documentary editing, museums, archives, and the military to speak about both specific aspects of their jobs as well as general advice for job seekers.

See below for the complete session information, and check out the other “Session of the Week” posts that have appeared on the blog, pulled from the content of the Program of the 125th Annual Meeting.

Careers in History: The Variety of the ProfessionAHA Session 3
Thursday, January 6, 2011: 3:00 PM-5:00 PM
Room 302 (Hynes Convention Center)

Chair: Aaron W. Marrs, Office of the Historian, U.S. Department of State

Panel:

Kevin Allen, Massachusetts Department of Conservation and Recreation
Robert B. Kane, U.S. Air Force
Steven Luckert, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
Nicholas Evan Sarantakes, U.S. Naval War College
C. James Taylor, Papers of John Adams, Massachusetts Historical Society
Megan Sniffin-Marinoff, Harvard University Archives

Blog LXIV (64): Another Question

2010-12-13T14:18:00.006-05:00

Over the weekend I had a conversation with a friend. He had a manuscript that he was trying to get published. He had originally thought about publishing it as an article, but got an offer to publish it as a chapter in an edited volume. That got the two of us to thinking about what would be better from a professional point of view an article or a chapter? If it were a question between a book and an article there would be no question. The book would win. But, what is better for your career an article or a chapter? I would love to hear the views of those that read this blog.

Blog LXIII (63): Teaching Effectiveness

2010-12-10T12:00:00.012-05:00

Are your students really learning what you are teaching them? How do you know? Why? Why not? Those are simple questions, but ones that are very difficult for historians, and many other professors to answer.

A little while back two professors in the University of California system (Philip Babcock at the Santa Barbara campus and Mindy Marks at the Riverside campus) published an article that shows that college students are devoting less and less time to studying than they did forty years ago. The average student at a regular four-year college in 1961 put in roughly 24 hours a week of study. Today the average student devotes only 14 hours.

That study has created a lot of consternation in higher education as people debate why? Any number of culperits have been found responsible for the decline in study: the rise of the computer, interactive media, and changing demographics. Some people have asked related questions about teaching effectiveness and wondered if it is a bad thing that students are studying less. Maybe modern students are better at using their time more effectively.

Babcock and Marks, for their part, believe the decline is due to what I called in Blog LX “the student vote.” They argue that a major reason for the decline in study hours is a breakdown in the relationship between the professor and the student. Instead of a situation where a professor sets standards and students try to meet them, they claim that the more common outcome is a scenario in which both sides hope to do as little as possible.

“No one really has an incentive to make a demanding class,” Marks told The Boston Globe. “To make a tough assignment, you have to write it, grade it. Kids come into office hours and want help on it. If you make it too hard, they complain. Other than the sheer love for knowledge and the desire to pass it on to the next generation, there is no incentive in the system to encourage effort.”

Murray Sperber, a visiting professor in the graduate school of education at the Berkeley branch of the University of California, blames teaching evaluations. The original idea behind evaluation was a noble one. Students got a chance to express their opinions about their classes, but the whole concept has backfired. Course evaluations have created a sort of “nonaggression pact,” Sperber explained to The Globe. Professors—particularly those seeking tenure—tread lightly on assignments and students reciprocate with glowing course evaluations.

I disagree with this assessment for two reasons. First, my personal assessment is that factors external to higher education are responsible for the decline in study hours. The big drop took place in the 1960s and 1970s. So the reasonable question to ask is what happened during this period? What were college students doing with this extra time? Two things: television and sex. Television, it is true, became a major cultural phenomenon in the 1950s before this drop, but college students in the early 1960s would have developed as high school students and, in some cases, college students before the television came to dominate American society. Also, there is a real possibility that their families could not have afforded to give them a television when they went off to college. Nor would there have been room for them in college dorm rooms. So television had less impact in 1961 than it did in 1969 or 1971.

The second reason is due to the development of the birth control pill. College students had sex long before the 1960s, but it became far more common after the pill gave women the power to control their fertility. As the chances of having sex increased, students (male and female) often found the pursuit of the other more interesting than studying accounting, political science, astronomy, or any of a number of other fields.

The other reason I disagree with this assessment is that it accords the students too much influence. As I discussed in Blog LX, student evaluations are not that influential. Now, in preparing to write this blog, I came across a number of news stories about professors being denied tenure. For one reason or another these stories, made it into the local media. The professor often claimed they were rejected because of teaching evaluations that complained of heavy study obligations. While those evaluations might indeed support the professor's claim, there usually is something else at work—like a failure to publish or publishing in mediocre venues unworthy of tenure. Adrianna Kezar, an associate professor of higher education at the University of Southern California, got to the point when she told The Chronicle of Higher Education, “Faculty rewards have nothing to do with the ability to assess student learning. I get promoted for writing lots of articles, not for demonstrating learning outcomes.”

The Babcock/Marks study is important because it is forcing some people to ask if students studying less is a good thing or a bad thing, and it is also getting people to ask how you assess student learning, which is no easy thing. Andrew Hacker, an emeritus professor of political science at the City University of New York's Queens College, who has been teaching for over fifty years admitted to The Chronicle that he has no way of knowing what type of impact he is having. “I couldn't say objectively or reliably what I do for students.”

I will repeat what I said in Blog LX, the student vote is important, but mainly in indirect ways. It is also important to consider that faculty have different stages of their careers in the classroom just as they do in publishing. Scott E. Carrell, an assistant professor of economics at the Davis branch of the University of California, explored learning at the U.S. Air Force Academy. What he found is interesting. The cadets that took introductory calculus from experienced professors failed to do as well in these introductory class as the cadets that took the course from more junior instructors. On the other hand, the cadets that had an experienced professors did better in higher-level courses than did students who had inexperienced teachers for introductory calculus.

A good professor should pay attention to those approaches that work with students and those that do not. “What do you think we’ve all been doing for 100 years?” Gary Rhoades, general secretary of the American Association of University Professors, asked a reporter from The Chronicle. “Classes are like organic things: Not every one is the same. If you are a good professor, you are responding to what students are getting and what they’re not. If you try and mechanize that, it can be a problem.”

He is right. A good teacher can only do so much with the raw material they have to work with, which is to say the intellectual ability of the students. A 2008 survey of undergraduates in the University of California system made that point. Students were asked to list what interferes most with their academic success. The number one reason, according to 33 percent, was that they simply did not know how to sit down and study.

With that point made, it might be a good thing for a new faculty member to be able to document their effectiveness with something more than teaching evaluations. Here at the Naval War College a lot of that is done for the faculty by our staff. Now, there is a difference between teaching mid-career professionals and teenagers. I also keep a diary to document what is working and not working in the classroom. Another simple way to document teaching effectiveness is to give students the same multiple-choice assignment at the beginning and end of the class. Use it as a diagnostic tool rather than a grading mechanism. Someday someone is going to question your teaching effectiveness and having this material might prove very useful.

Blog LXII (62): A Question

2010-12-03T13:18:00.007-05:00

I have a question, and I hope readers of this blog will answer it for me. What is the biggest issue facing the history profession right now? I would like to get your feedback and use it at the session I will be doing at the AHA in January. I will also use the information for a future blog essay.

Feel free to respond in the comment section of this blog, on Facebook, or via a note to my personal e-mail address. To get my address all you have to do is google "Sarantakes." It is not that common a name.

I will tabulate the answers in early January.

Blog LXI (61): The AHA is Coming

2010-12-02T14:37:00.015-05:00

In a few weeks, I will be part of a panel at the 2011 meeting of the American Historical Association. The session is: "Careers in History: The Variety of the Profession." The session will be on the first day of the conference: Thursday, January 6, 2011 at 3 pm. The focus of this panel will be as on using your Ph.D. when you cannot get a job in a conventional history department. The conference program committee is expecting a heavy turnout, and has put us in a big room. C-Span has asked for permission to record the session. In an ironic twist, the AHA put this panel in a central location next to the job center. (It is ironic in that most of those interviews will be for jobs in history departments, otherwise the location would seem approrpriate.) The room is also near the messaging center. So that will encourage additional foot traffic.

Here is an excerpt from page 39 of the 2011 conference program:

Since this AHA session will be discussing many of the issues that I have tried to examine with this blog, I would like to invite all of you to attend. This panel will be far more productive if we have interested people. So please come. This session has the potential to be very interesting--and informative.

Blog LX (60): The Student Vote

2010-11-29T09:44:00.009-05:00

Teaching is important. It is a major professional activity that graduate school does a poor job of preparing the promising scholar for once they graduate. There are plenty of journal articles, web sites, and blogs that share teaching tips and techniques. How though do you incorporate teaching into career? I do not know that that particular topic gets discussed much. So here goes.

1) Does teaching matter? The short answer to that question—as I mentioned in Blog LVII—is: yes. There is a longer more complex answer to that question, though. The importance of teaching will be a function of where you teach. It will be of little importance at a research university, while it will be crucial at a community college. In most cases, though, your advancement in the profession or at an individual institution will be based on matters other than teaching—publications and service. Teaching will still matter, but more in indirect matters.

2) Students get a vote. Education is a collaborative activity, but it is no democracy. Some faculty believe that the mission of teaching is to educate and being a popular teacher often gets in the way of that objective. Put another way, pushing students to develop their analytical and thinking skills is not the same thing as being entertaining. There is truth in that observation. There are direct correlations between grades and evaluations. Students getting high grades are far more likely to give instructors good comments, while those that are getting bad grades are going to use teaching evaluations as a form of payback. In addition, seniors are more inclined to make more positive comments than freshmen.

The natural tendency among many professors is to basically disregard student evaluations as nothing more than popularity contests. There are sound reasons to take that view, but what if you took the evaluations at face value? To some degree students are consumers and they do get to vote with their feet in the form of their enrollments. They want to learn and often eager to obtain the knowledge that the professor has to offer. It is wrong to ignore that enthusiasm. There will be students that will discover dating while in college or will be more committed to their fraternity or sorority, or will be cruising because your class is not as important as two other biology classes that are required for admission into medical school, but that should not obscure the fact that many students come to class with enthusiasm. A friend of mine was teaching at San Diego State as an adjunct, and took that attitude. He read the evaluations carefully, took them at face value, and responded to them accordingly. The result was his evaluations went up dramatically. They were so good that he was offered a new contract. He also had no problem in drawing students to his sections. That is crucial for a part-time instructor. It is also an important consideration for a new professor on the tenure track and even senior faculty. Students will avoid professors that fail to teach material they find meaningful. The result is that some faculty will find that they have difficulty in drawing students. They might not get to teach the classes they want (upper division courses in their areas of specialization) or will have to teach classes they do not want to teach (like U.S. history surveys). Faculty that have a reputation as a good teacher will often have classes that draw dozens and dozens of students. Classes that are cash cows for departments can be very important in a number of ways. They help fund graduate programs and give you influence within your department. It is also easier to get grad students admitted in your areas of specialization, if there is a documented need for students that can serve as teaching assistants for courses in those subjects. The professor that can draw in students should also—depending on the funding formula—significant influence within the department.

Blog LIX (59): Videos

2010-11-23T15:00:00.009-05:00

There is a new phenomenon out on the internet. It is the "So you Want to Get a PhD in the Humanities." It has spawned several variations. The videos are enormously popular not because they are funny--they are--but because the best satire always uses the truth.

I have put three of the videos up here. Everything--and I do mean everything--discussed in these videos has an element of truth. Each of the complaints that the professors make are those that are fairly common place in academia and representative of someone's life and career. The videos are much like cop shows on television. Most police officers in real life will only draw or discharge their weapon once, but it is not unusual for the lead in a television series to fire off bullet after bullet in one season, much less a career even if the story lines are like Law & Order and ripped from actual headlines. (It happens, just not to the same person over and over). The same is true with these videos.

I have included three. The original humanities Ph.D video. The one on political science, and finally the one on history. The history one is also the most harsh.

Blog LVIII (58): A Teaching Workshop

2010-11-08T08:30:00.006-05:00

On August 5 and 6, 2010, the Department of Strategy and Policy at the U.S. Naval War College sponsored a workshop on the teaching of grand strategy. This workshop brought together 20 visiting scholars from colleges and universities all across the country to talk with the faculty of the Strategy Department, and a small group of visitors from other NWC departments and the Naval War College Foundation. All told, 75 different people attended the two-day event. The conference focused solely on teaching. I have never seen or heard of a department bringing all its faculty together to discuss the art of teaching, much less bringing in a number of guests. As a result, I took a lot of notes during those two days. This blog essay is a short and condensed version of a report on the issues that got discussed during those two days.

Four things are important to note before we begin. First, the discussants were multidisciplinary in nature. Our guests were from history, political science, and public policy programs. Second, while the conversations focused on how to teach grand strategy (a multidisciplinary topic) much of the conversations translates very easily into discussions on how to teach history. Third, the Naval War College has a non-attribution policy. The College adopted this policy to encourage a free flow of ideas. While in my opinion, nothing that controversial was said during this gathering, I do not intend to violate this policy. As a result, no individuals will be mentioned by name in this blog essay. Fourth, while teaching is a voyage of discovery, prior planning and thinking can save you a good deal of time that you can use for other professional activities. Since teaching is actually what most of us spend most of our time doing, that is no small consideration for other career goals and options.

The conference started with an opening speaker. This individual noted that what the NWC does is significant and offered two examples. He explained that the writings of Rear Admiral Alfred Thayer Mahan have stood the test of time. Mahan, who was the second president of the War College and was president of the American Historical Association in 1902 is currently being read in China for better or worse. The speaker also noted that under the leadership of Rear Admiral Stansfield Turner, the NWC in the early 1970s took the lead in developing courses in strategy, which had helped develop many of the programs represented in the room. “We can learn from one another about the craft,” he explained.

One of the first major teaching issues focused on context. A guest scholar from the United Kingdom observed that one of the key issues when teaching strategy is to understand the changes that take place. The tendency is to see strategy as a “generic thing” in simple structured terms. He added, “The context is important to understand where they are coming from.” Staff Colleges did not see changes and a good instructor needs to educate students to challenge of change.

Another guest from an Ivy League school disagreed. He replied that yes, context is important, and it is an issue that is important when discussing the Peloponnesian Wars. Yet, only to a degree. The course is on strategy, not history. As teachers of grand strategy, we need to back away from context and look at enduring principles. A member of the Strategy Department said he wants his student “to think like a historian.” The important thing for them to see is the “continuity and change.” He wants his students to ask “What’s similar, what’s different.” That analytical approach can be developed through the use of the theorists and it is really important for military officers to develop that skill. He always wants a voice in back of their mind, what’s different about this situation.

A senior NWC official raised several issues that the room began discussing. Since there were over seventy people in the room, the various topics of discussion overlapped. The senior asked: what constraints does an instructor face in designing a class. The big one at the NWC is time. How much context do we have to give? The other trade off is reading workload. Course critiques constantly stress that the students do not have time to do all the readings. When they reach the case studies, they see how important theorists are and it makes them frustrated that they have not had more time to think about the theorists. The reality is that the students have difficultly doing all the readings.

These questions provoked a good deal of discussion, since they are basically the same issues that instructors face in most environments. One visitor from Pennsylvania, said, “I am appalled at the idea of doing Thucydides in two hours?” How do you read a 700 page book, he asked. You got to wait out students, he said answering his own question. You ask questions and then wait for response. Another guest agreed to a degree. He has done two hours on page one of Herodotus, but that approach cannot be done at War Colleges. Military schools have to focus on key sections, and get to the “theory of the whole.”

Several members of the workshop analyzed the discussion and provided some good commentary. A War College professor said class is always a beginning. A good professor helps a student create a habit of mind. A guest from a New York school added, “All of this is a tradeoff between breadth and depth.” Most people in the room keep talking about depth, but there is a need to compare the two different modes. “There is no obvious solution to striking the right balance between breadth and depth.” A visitor from a school in the Big Ten noticed that many of the issues that this gather was talking about in teaching are the same issues that people face in making strategy: breadth vs. depth and the scarcity of time. A good instructor and course will make students familiar with these issues.

Another topic the assembly examined was what type of books should an instructor assign. The Big Ten professor observed that making policy is difficult and he wants his students to understand three factors: first, choosing between options is difficult; second, they should have an understanding of how contingency comes into play; third, the judgment of individuals is crucial. Many of the mentioned in today’s discussion offer models of judicious thinking about difficult decisions. A professor from a different Big Ten school said he assigns books that make it clear that people make grand strategy. “The students get it.”

A War College professor said there is an art to assigning books: “It’s not which great books we use, but how we use them.” He continued, explaining, “It’s the role of the teacher to be disagreeable.” A good instructor will “attack the literature in a productive way” so that it teaches them how to think. “That’s the key.” Giving them this analytical skill set will do them a great service.

Several professors from Ivy League schools that books also help when dealing with students. One noted that all students at prestigious schools—the military academies or an Ivy League university—already think they are leaders. Another said one of the ways you deal with this issue is to hit them with great books. Another is to have them do simulations where they have to develop a strategy and then deal with a crisis. One student said the faculty were trying to make students fail. That, he remarked, is true. Saying, “I don’t know to a boss but I will find out” is extremely difficult. The exercise is generally successful. The students get insights and often are what the faculty want students to get.

Blog LVII (57): Teaching and Your Career

2010-09-14T17:57:00.004-04:00

Teaching. It is something all of us that do history do. And we do a lot of it. It is also probably a major reason most of decided to become historians. Someone reached us through their work in the classroom. I know that was the case for me as it was.

It is also something that new scholars do a lot of. So how does the new scholar make teaching part of their career plan? This question is one that this blog has ignored for the most part. The only thing that has been discussed the plight of the adjunct, but what about teaching itself?

Since I mentioned adjuncts, let me discuss that subject for a moment or two. Does working as an adjunct help make yourself a stronger candidate for a full-time position? To a degree, the answer is yes. Working as an adjunct is good in that it gives you an opportunity to be the instructor of record and gain some experience in teaching. Some graduate programs are very good about preparing their students and some are not. In an ironic twist, those grad students that are awarded fellowships that free them up to focus on their research are often at a disadvantage in pursuing many jobs because these positions often are at institutions that emphasize teaching. Those type of jobs are far more common than those at a Research I or Research II University.

I even saw this happen once. I was on a search committee and a newly minted Ph.D. from Princeton applied for a job. He had a good dissertation that clearly had was going to push the historiography along in his field. He, however, had letters of recommendation that were less than helpful. They were not bad, but his professors thought their names and the Princeton degree would in and of itself get him a job. The problem was another Princeton grad applied for the job as well. I should also add that Ph.D.s from Harvard, Yale, Columbia, and Chicago put in applications as well. This Princeton Ph.D. was teaching at community colleges in Dallas and had his supervisors write letters of recommendation for his application file. They were excellent. They were positive, but also described his record of teaching, his philosophy and his contributions as a good departmental citizen. These were constructive and useful to a committee that was made up of people that did not even know the name of his supervising professor. Really, none of us did, but it was clear that the guy was a big shot in his field.

Now, there is a downside to working as adjunct, and it is not the near subsistence level salary and lack of benefits that do not come with these positions. The shortcoming is that you are teaching the introductory classes: western civilization or U.S. history I or U.S. history II. That type of work does not give you an opportunity to show that you can develop classes in your own field or that you can supervise graduate students. In short, there is a utility to working as an adjunct but it is limited.

Oh, some might be wondering what happened to the Princeton Ph.D. He made our on campus interview list--but turned us down because another school made him an offer before we did the interview.

Administrative Note 12

2010-08-30T02:03:00.002-04:00

Sorry for the long delay in posting. A number of research trips and functions at work kept my busy. The blog will return with more essays in a few days. I promise.

Blog LVI (56): Stephen Ambrose: Another Rebutal

2010-07-22T15:50:00.010-04:00

When it rains it pours. Many others have been discussing the Stephen Ambrose case and it is looking worse and worse for the late, great historian. Lori Cune is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of California at Davis. She is writing a dissertation entitled "Executing the Rosenbergs: A Transnational History." In this essay, originally published on the History News Network, she discusses how her own research has brought many of Ambrose's writings into question. As she makes clear, there is more to her work than young scholar knocking down established scholar to make a name and reputation. Like me, Ambrose's writings influenced her to go to become a scholar and she clearly confronts his shortcomings more out of sadness than anger. Here is her article originially title: "Stephen Ambrose's Falsifications of the Rosenberg Execution":

I met Stephen Ambrose when I was a young, idealistic graduate student attending my first American Historical Association conference in the late 1980s. He graciously shared his paper – and enthusiasm – with the groupies he attracted. Years later, his Rise to Globalism was on my coffee table so often that I have a photo of my then two-year-old son “reading” it. It is safe to say his work played a role in my decision to study history.

The New Yorker’s recent allegations that Ambrose manufactured interviews with – and likely quotes from – Eisenhower (“Channeling Ike,” by Richard Rayner, April 26), combined with earlier accusations of plagiarism, have tarnished his reputation. In my research on the case of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg (arrested for conspiracy to commit espionage in 1950 and executed in 1953), I have recently discovered instances where Ambrose also fabricated information from written documents.

In chapter thirteen of Ike’s Spies: Eisenhower and the Espionage Establishment (1981), Ambrose explains in two footnotes that his section on the Rosenberg case is based on his interviews with Eisenhower and Attorney General Herbert Brownell, and Eisenhower’s memoir of White House Years 1953-56, Mandate for Change (1963). On page 182 of Ike’s Spies Ambrose writes: “Some of Ike’s most trusted advisers told him he would have to grant a stay of execution because the nation simply could not put to death the mother of small children. Many in the Cabinet recommended clemency.” I do not believe any part of these statements to be true. While we cannot know what Eisenhower or Brownell told Ambrose when interviewed, in Mandate for Change Eisenhower makes no mention of advisers urging clemency because Ethel was a mother, or for any other reason. For Cabinet recommendations, I attempted to corroborate Ambrose’s account with Cabinet meeting minutes. The minutes from the two meetings where the Rosenberg case was discussed (12 February 1953 and 19 June 1953, the day of the executions) contradict Ambrose’s assertions. According to the Cabinet minutes of Staff Secretary L. Arthur Minnich, no one expressed support for clemency when asked at the February meeting. During the June meeting, U.N. Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge and presidential advisor C.D. Jackson suggested the need for an additional presidential statement on the case, but no one recommended clemency. According to Attorney General Herbert Brownell’s oral history housed at the Eisenhower Library (interview by Ed Edwin, 5 May 1967, OH-157, 3 of 5, 189-196), Brownell stated (page 193-4): “I cannot recall that any Cabinet member voiced such a position [support for pardon] at the Cabinet meetings…I can’t remember any Cabinet member ever dissenting from that viewpoint [that the Rosenbergs were guilty].” Brownell continued on page 196 that Eisenhower “would have subordinated his views about the world-wide effect on the Russian government’s propaganda campaign” and offered clemency if the president doubted the Rosenbergs’ guilt, which Brownell asserted he did not. While it is theoretically possible that Brownell, in a subsequent (undated) interview with Ambrose, contradicted his earlier insistence that Eisenhower allow the executions to proceed, this does not hold up to the propensity of evidence. In fact, while international opinion ran hot for clemency, the majority of Americans appeared to support the executions and had little problem putting “to death the mother of small children.”

Another example comes from Ambrose’s discussion of the Rosenberg case in Eisenhower: The President, Volume Two (1984). On page 84 Ambrose writes that on the day of the executions Eisenhower “said he could not remember a time in his life when he felt more in need of help from someone more powerful than he.” Ambrose’s footnote reads Emmet John Hughes’ The Ordeal of Power: A Political Memoir of the Eisenhower Years (1962), 80; and Minnich, Cabinet, 6/19/53. Hughes, an aid and speechwriter for Eisenhower, quotes Minnich’s Cabinet meeting minutes and makes no mention of Eisenhower’s “need of help.” This sentiment is not in any of the versions of the June 19 Cabinet meeting agendas or minutes. One wonders why Ambrose felt compelled to imply that Eisenhower needed the help of a higher power when he decided to allow the execution of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg to proceed. Eisenhower “could not remember a time in his life” when he needed “help from someone more powerful.” Really? Not even D-Day?

While small examples, these hint at a much larger problem. Ambrose not only fabricated interviews with Eisenhower, he manufactured written evidence relating to his presidency as well. I found these discrepancies in just a few hours in one little corner of Eisenhower’s career, the Rosenberg case. If we all investigate the pieces we know best, a clearer picture will emerge. Perhaps the examples I have from the Rosenberg case are unique. I fear, however, that for today’s graduate students Ambrose will be known more for plagiarism and falsified evidence than for his popular narrative prose.