After four years of college, 10 years of graduate education and the investment of a small fortune in studying the larger questions of the humanities, how are the job prospects? Dismal.
Anne Whisnant, project manager for programs funded through the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation at the John Hope Franklin Humanities Institute, said she is concerned by the dearth of positions in academia for Ph.D. recipients in the humanities, especially in light of the trend of replacing tenure-track positions with adjunct or professor of the practice positions.
Whisnant has found that while the gates of academia seem to be closing more rapidly than graduate school entrants ever anticipated, there is a market for humanities Ph.D. holders outside of the ivory tower.
But the external market, Whisnant explained, may not be the answer to all of the problems humanities Ph.D. recipients encounter in a society that financially rewards the sciences more than the humanities.
“The social value placed on the humanities, just in the crassest market terms, is low. I mean even [for] people who go outside [academia],” Whisnant said. “It’s really a problem that goes beyond the University to, what does our society value financially?”
A difficult road
William Pannapacker, a 1999 Duke graduate and professor at Hope College in Holland, Mich., said he estimated only one out of five humanities Ph.D. holders will make it in academia.
“There is very little distinction with those who end up with fine positions and those who end up with adjunct positions,” he said.
Adjunct positions are based on temporary contracts and can be either part or full time. Tenured and assistant professors enjoy salaries and job stability far superior to adjuncts’. They are essentially guaranteed permanent employment under the American Association of University Professor’s 1940 Statement of Principles on Academic Freedom and Tenure, which was enacted to ensure both job stability and free expression for professors.
Recently, universities have been cutting back on the number of tenure-track positions that they offer in the humanities.
Gregson Davis, Duke’s dean of the humanities, acknowledged the trend of replacing tenure-track positions with part-time positions and the difficulty of finding tenure-track positions in the humanities because there are more applicants than open positions.
“It’s generally the case these days that there are fewer jobs available,” Davis said. “The economic reality is such that we are unable to expand the faculty at the rate that we were able to.”
Adjunct professors, who are usually paid on a course-by-course basis, are cheaper to employ than permanent professors. According to an AAUP study, part-time professors earn approximately 64 percent less per hour than full-time, tenure-track professors. For the number of hours they work, adjunct professors are paid less than minimum wage, Pannapacker said.
In addition, positions many humanities Ph.D. holders expected to open up are have remained occupied by tenured professors for longer periods of time. This stems from the dissolution of mandatory retirement, which previously ensured more regular vacancies. Pannapacker also said that after they are vacated, many tenure-track positions are replaced by adjunct positions.
According to Pannapacker, two-thirds of courses in academia are not taught by tenured faculty.
A different route
Although Alexandra Lord, a 1995 history Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, was one of the few among her peers who found a tenure-track position at a state college, she felt dissatisfied with her options in academia.
Lord was not happy about the isolated, rural environment of the college where she received her appointment, nor was she pleased by the academic atmosphere.
“It’s an incredibly solitary profession, ” Lord said. “I found it extraordinarily hierarchical. I didn’t like this very hierarchical structure in the workplace. I wanted something much more, where you’re working with colleagues and you’re part of a team.”
Lord is not alone in her dissatisfaction with the current options for humanities Ph.D. holders. Frustrated, she and others have turned to alternative professional fields, such as government and the private sector.
Lord, who designed a website called BeyondAcademe.com—which provides information about alternatives to academia—is now working as the acting historian for the United States Public Health Service. She believes her government position makes use of her training in a more fulfilling manner than her professorship did a few years ago.
“I think that history has value, and I didn’t think that academia rewarded or encouraged historians to speak broadly to a wider audience. That was pretty frustrating to me,” Lord said.
Lord added that she was not sure of her options outside of academia when she left school because no one in her graduate experience informed her of opportunities outside of the academic community.
She said she ended up working with the federal government mostly because she wanted to live in Washington, D.C., but has found that her federal job allows her more time for research and rewards her advanced degree with three times the salary she made as a professor.
Others have had less success finding positions. Kent Lehnhof, who earned a Ph.D. in English literature at Duke in 2002, searched for a job for four years before finding his current position as an assistant professor of English and comparative literature at Chapman University in Orange, Calif.
Though he found the services of the Career Center helpful, Lehnhof said he felt discouraged by the seeming randomness of the job search process.
“There was just this growing frustration there wasn’t very much I could do,” he said. “I’m the same person now. It’s just such a highly whimsical process based on you as a round peg finding a round hole.”
Lehnhof was able to continue his protracted education and job search, but he said he would not have been able to discriminate as much among possible positions in his search without his wife’s income.
While he was in the job search process, Lehnhof taught as an adjunct professor. He was paid on a course-by-course basis and did not always receive benefits, including health care.
Lehnhof noted that his adjunct position allowed him more time to do research, which he hoped would increase his success in finding a job.
“The belief is that if you just have one more article or just one more thing to make you stand out, then that would be the difference between last year’s unsuccessful search and this year’s successful one,” Lehnhof said.
Craig DeAlmeida, a 2004 music composition Ph.D. from Duke, is working part time at a warehouse that sells comic and sci-fi books and teaching a summer math course to support himself while he searches for an academic job. Like Lehnhof, he is bolstered by his wife’s income.
DeAlmeida, who also attended Duke as an undergraduate, said he knew the job search was not going to be easy from conversations he had with graduate students.
“I was more frustrated at the prospect of [the job search]” than the experience of it, DeAlmeida said. “For the most part, I’ve kind of made peace with the process.”
Stay the course
The statistics do not portray a rosy job market for those entering academia. A 2004 survey on history Ph.D.s conducted by the American Historical Association highlighted the increased enrollment in history Ph.D. programs in contrast to the decreased number of open positions in academia, especially for new professors.
According to the AHA, in the past 12 years the number of Ph.D.s awarded has eclipsed the number of new jobs. There was a 6.5 percent increase in history Ph.D. holders and a 1.8 percent decrease in advertised jobs in the 2003-2004 academic year.
Pannapacker, however, is optimistic that graduates can be successful if they reshape their expectations of the job search and their work habits. He said the key to a successful job hunt is protecting one’s mental health. “Graduate students live in a kind of soup of paranoia. The situation is bleak but it is not hopeless,” Pannapacker said.
Pannapacker also believes graduate students can benefit from instituting a nine-to-five discipline in their lives. “There’s a culture, a feeling that you can hang out at coffee shops and read and then produce at the last minute,” he said. “The romantic geniuses tend to burn out, and because they’re erratic, people don’t depend on them.”
He also suggested that recent graduates entering the job search need to remain flexible about which positions they are willing to accept. Graduate students are often disappointed when the only offers they receive come from small liberal arts schools in rural areas, Pannapacker explained, because they want a position at a large research university.
Pannapacker advised job seekers not too hold out too long for the perfect job. If they receive a position in an undesirable location, they should not necessarily perceive it as permanent but as a “first job rather than a lifelong position,” Pannapacker said.
In addition, some smaller liberal arts colleges offer unique options for graduates interested in finding positions in academia.
Swarthmore College Provost Connie Hungerford noted in an e-mail that Swarthmore is not replacing its tenure-track positions with adjunct professors. She said adjunct appointments are usually temporary, lasting until a search is conducted for a full-time or tenure-track replacement.
Hungerford also explained that Swarthmore has maintained a fairly even distribution of tenure-track professors across the humanities, social sciences, natural sciences and engineering departments.
Given the intensely competitive and often random job market that is academia, Pannapacker also stressed the importance of networking with other graduate students. “In the final rounds of job searches it is always some invisible unarticulated variable that makes the decision,” Pannapacker said.
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