I’m so glad I’m not in San Diego right now, because watching the academic job market in action always makes my head hurt. It also gives me flashbacks to my underemployed days, which are no fun either. Writing about it doesn’t exactly improve my mood, but I’ve been feeling like doing just that ever since I read the summary of the new AHA jobs report earlier this week. If you haven’t seen it, the news isn’t good:

In the 2008–09 academic year job advertisements fell by 23.8 percent—from a record high of 1,053 openings in 2007–08 to 806 openings in the past year. This was the smallest number of positions advertised with the AHA in a decade. To make matters worse, a subsequent survey of advertisers indicates that about 15 percent of the openings were cancelled after the positions were advertised. And while we have not finished taking advertisements this year, it will come as no surprise to anyone following the ads that job openings continue to decline.

Even as the number of openings fell sharply, the number of new PhDs reported to the annual Directory of History Departments, Historical Organizations, and Historians increased by more than 17 percent, from 741 in the 2007–08 academic year to 869. This was the largest year-to-year increase since we began tabulating this information in the Directory in 1975.

Demand down. Supply up. That’s a recipe for a lot of labor pain.

Perhaps the reason for the glut of applicants is that (via C. Vann Winchell – Fess up! You read him too!) the Wall Street Journal has named “historian” the fifth-best job in America. However, as one of the criterion they used in ranking vocations was “employment outlook,” the new AHA job report strongly suggests to me that the creators of that list are on drugs.

Marc Bousquet has read the AHA jobs report too and seems to have some of the same reaction that I did to the WSJ....

What raised my eyebrows–and those of many others doing scholarship in academic labor–was his insistence that the labor market for faculty in history is a matter of an “oversupply” of persons holding doctorates, and that the profession needs to control “the supply side of the market,” ie, “cut the number of students” in doctoral programs.

This is the sort of thing that used to get said all the time by disciplinary-association staffers–as what I call part of a “second wave” of thinking about academic labor, emerging out of discredited supply-side thought dating back to the Reagan administration. Thanks to the third wave of thought arising from graduate students and contingent faculty in the academic labor movement, you just don’t hear so much of this sort of thing anymore. In most fields, it’s pretty well understood that the real issue is an undersupply of tenure-track jobs, ie, that the issue needs to be addressed from the “demand side.” There’s no real oversupply of folks holding the PhD because what’s happened is an aggressive, intentional restructuring of demand by administrators–in many fields, work that used to be done by persons holding the PhD and on the tenure track is now done by persons without the terminal degree and contingently. Increasingly, even undergraduates are are playing a role in this restructured “demand” for faculty work, participating in the instruction of other undergraduates.

I won’t disagree with Marc on the notion that the restructuring of the academic job market for historians is a huge part of the problem. Anyone who cares more about education understands that it is better to have more tenure-track faculty teaching in their department and should support conversion of adjunct to tenure-track positions on that grounds alone. This is not because adjunct faculty are necessarily inferior teachers. It’s because professors who have job security and make a living wage can concentrate on teaching more even if they do do research and sit on committees. Would you teach better if your load was 5-5 rather than 2-3? Of course not. It’s the same principle.

Nevertheless, the degradation of academic labor in general doesn’t necessarily mean that the supply side of humanities Ph.D.s shouldn’t be more in line with demand. Every tenured professor in America could get radicalized tomorrow, but if history graduate departments keep churning out more Ph.D.s there’s still going to be a lot of pain before the ensuing revolution ever takes effect.

Marc asks a lot of good questions about the AHA’s supply numbers, to which the best I can do is refer him to the guy who helped crystalize my views on the oversupply of history Ph.Ds, Ralph Luker. Back in 2007, he wrote a post called “Wherein I Name a Dozen or More Doctoral Programs in History that Ought to be Shut Down.” Here’s the conclusion:

Most of the doctoral programs that I’ve cited are small. Closing them might not dramatically reduce the glut on the job market for young history professors. But they are marginal programs, at best, and would better serve their constituencies by concentrating on offering the best M.A. programs in history that they can muster.

The key phrase there is “serve their constituencies.” If you can place your people in full-time jobs then by all means educate them. If you can’t, don’t. Notice how Ralph wasn’t suggesting the end of graduate programs – just Ph.D. programs. You don’t need a Ph.D. to teach history at a community college, which is probably why they don’t seem to show up in the AHA’s data.

Playing the lottery costs a buck and is usually over in an instant. Going to graduate school is a lot more expensive (even if the funds do go to education in both instances) and the opportunity costs last a lifetime. Sure, some people will win the fifth best job in America when it’s over, but it’s the people who won’t hit the lottery after the convention in San Diego (or who have already lost) who need more attention from the people who teach them.

Marc Bousquet has certainly started a far-reaching discussion about the job market for historians. Besides what’s at Marc’s home blog, I’ve only gotten to the part at Historiann (which, to return her favor, is well worth your time). I’ll finish reading all the other links in Marc’s new post as soon as I finish holding down my end of this conversation. Here’s Marc:

I also take Jonathan’s point…that eliminating certain programs might do the profession good. That’s probably true in some ways in most fields–at least insofar as there are programs that might be doing a poor job of preparing future scholars–but I wonder if that’s not a different sort of conversation to have?

Closing programs doing a bad job of preparing future historians isn’t going to answer real questions (should community college faculty hold the PhD?) or seriously alter hiring patterns (who hires badly-prepared faculty anyway?).

It’s not about quality to me, but economic reality. History programs that can’t place their Ph.D.s might give them a bang-up education, but I’d contend that they aren’t doing their students any favors. While I share Marc’s institutional concerns, I can’t escape thinking about the job market on a personal level. My primary objective in a discussion like this is doing my best to prevent anyone from getting that sinking feeling that they just spent seven or eight years of their life and (depending on the school) somewhere in the neighborhood of $100,000, yet the skills they just gained can barely put food on their table let alone make their health insurance affordable.

I consider myself extremely lucky to have never experienced this firsthand, but I vividly remember anticipating that feeling because it seemed very likely for a time. I got my current job from the lovely institution that eventually awarded me tenure in June! [And yes, it was advertised as a tenure track assistant professorship.] One reason that C. Vann Winchell post made me laugh (albeit nervously) is that I distinctly remember my “That’s it, I’ll go to Law School!” phase as one of the lowest points in my life.

I’ve taken some flack around here for recommending students stay as far away from graduate school in the humanities as humanly possible (except if they have some pre-existing mechanism to pay for it). I feel this way because I don’t want anything to do with training people for skills that have an incredibly limited market and will likely continue to do so for a long time to come. Despite some opposition, this attitude is not uncommon in my department. As a result, our graduate program is composed overwhelmingly of already-employed secondary school teachers who will get guaranteed raises with their (terminal) M.A. degrees.

I think Jonathan’s saying that reducing supply is more doable than addressing casualization (as Alan hints also) and would at least do no harm.

But I’m not actually sure about either prong of that observation. Including the assumption it wouldn’t be harmful.

Wouldn’t restricting supply (even if possible practically and ethically) do at minimum the harm of answering in advance certain real questions (”nope, community colleges and small schools don’t need ‘real’ historians”) and bypass others (”what should teaching and learning at those schools be like anyway?)?

Actually, my position would be let’s reduce supply AND address casualization. It’s not like I have statistics at my fingertips, but I’m pretty sure that the existing surplus of historians is big enough that if the profession cut new history Ph.D.s to zero next year [Is this starting to sound like a global warming debate?], there would still be more than enough underemployed ones left over to fill every adjunct slot in America that we could ever hope to convert to a job that pays a livable wage.

I’ve deliberately avoided the term “tenure track” in that last sentence because my criterion for success is not the tenure track; it’s whether your education will result in a position that allows you to live reasonably well and pay your mortgage. Keeping contingent labor on a contingent basis until restructuring occurs (if it ever occurs) isn’t fair to them. I think Winchell, at least, agrees with me, which is why he suggests other lines of work for rejected San Diego interviewees (just not lawyer, teacher or roustabout).

Now you’ve done it Marc! My head hurts again. Therefore, I think I’ll pass up that extra reading until the pounding stops, but maybe take it up again when I have enough Advil handy to tackle the rest of the discussion.

From a distance, of course–Potterville is about 1,137 miles away, 4,659 feet higher, and 70 degrees colder than San Diego this morning. Damn! but I wish I were waking up in the Hotel del Coronado today. It’s -11 here now–but it will be sunny, at least! The sun is about the only thing San Diego will have in common today with the High Plains Sub-Zero Freezer we’re locked in until the weekend. Classy Claude will be filing a first-person report later this weekend, if he can peel himself off the beach, shake the sand out of his drawers, and find a wifi hotspot.

First, the good news: the 2010 annual meeting of the American Historical Association is in San Diego! That’s it for the good news I’ve heard. If you’re there and not interviewing for jobs, interviewing for jobs you’re unlikely to get, or interviewing dozens of candidates for a job at your institution, at least you can do it without wearing boots and lugging a giant coat around a big hotel because you’re stuck yet again in Chicago or Boston. (Who’s with me on pushing the AHA to south and west, friends? We’ll throw Denver in there too, for you winter sports enthusiasts. How about instead of Chicago, Boston, Chicago, New York, Chicago, Washington, D.C., Chicago, Atlanta, and Chicago, we have Dallas, Phoenix, San Diego/L.A., Denver, and San Francisco?)

Inside Higher Ed reports that attendance is down at the AHA this year, because of the economy and the related dearth of open positions in history. (There are also fewer drop-ins than there would be in major Eastern cities because of the West Coast location, too, and the additional travel expense for people in the Eastern and Central time zones especially.) And, the AHA itself reported that it’s “A Grim Year on the Academic Job Market for Historians,” because “[d]uring 2008–09 job advertisements fell by 23.8 percent—from a record high of 1,053 openings in 2007–08 to 806 openings in the past year. This was the smallest number of positions advertised with the AHA in a decade. To make matters worse, a subsequent survey of advertisers indicates that about 15 percent of the openings were cancelled after the positions were advertised.” Marc Bousquet at How the University Works takes issue with the AHA report’s conclusion that the problem is an oversupply of history Ph.D.s, and says that it’s not an oversupply of qualified job candidates, but that it’s an undersupply of tenure-track jobs because of university administrators’ decisions over the past 25 years to hire more contingent faculty than tenured or tenure-track faculty proportionally.

In his post, Bousquet flatters Historiann as a “really smart” person in history who thinks about these issues. I have to admit that I do little more than think and occasionally write about them–so understand that I get all of my data from Robert Townsend at the AHA, too. As to the question whether it’s the supply-side or the demand-side in history employment that ’s the cause of this crisis, my sympathies lie with Marc’s analysis. I think he also raises some great questions about which historians the AHA actually represents–my sense is that they represent most four-year institutions and people who teach there, not public historians, secondary school teachers, or community college professors, which may explain some of the biases of its data.

I wonder, though: where all these people are coming from on the supply side? Why are there still so many smart, talented people rushing off to get Ph.D.s in history? Townsend’s article notes that the numbers of history graduate students has been “have been relatively consistent over the past decade“–hovering back and forth close to 12,000. No one I know is selling graduate students on the marvellous future employment opportunities, and I don’t think I’m the only historian out there with ethical and honest friends and colleagues. (Jonathan Rees offers some interesting thoughts on the supply-side question, too–check him out. And, bookmark this gossipmonger, C. Vann Winchell: ze’s a lot less earnest and helpful than I am, but probably a lot more fun.)

So, on with the earnest and helpful: Our current “crisis,” as Townsend notes, is a variation on a theme we’ve been seeing and hearing for 20 or 30 years. From what I’ve heard from friends who finished grad school in the mid-70s and early 80s, our current crisis has nothing on what that generation faced (walking to the library through snowstorms, uphill, both ways, etc.) But seriously: the college tuition benefit of the G.I. Bill in the 1940s and 1950s, which along with Cold War funding of space and weapons research, led to a massive growth and expansion of American universities in the 1950s and 60s. When the bottom dropped out of this expansion and concurrent hiring binge in the 1970s, there was truly a “lost generation” of historians who either left the profession, or went into public history. (I think it’s this generation that elevated the stature of public history, because so many of them brought their professional training into museums, archives, and other public history ventures, which was all for the better.) Since then, we’ve seen the chronic de-funding of public universities and the withdrawal of other public education subsidies, and the rise of corporate-style management in university administration: get the most for the least by destabilizing the faculty (by shifting more of them away from tenure-track positions) and now de-skilling our work (with the rise of on-line courses.) I’d welcome additions or corrections to this short history from those of you who are survivors of the “lost generation” especially–Susan? Indyanna? Random lurkers? What have I left out that’s important for today’s whippersnappers to understand?

I have remarked to friends of mine that I feel like I won the lottery because I took my degree in December 1996, just as the job market was picking up in the later 90s. I started my first tenure-track job in the fall of 1997, and then applied in the fall of 2000 for other jobs, and came to Baa Ram U. in the fall of 2001. I hit the sweet spot almost perfectly–especially as a young woman. At that time, it seemed like I and a lot of my women friends had good luck, because the departments that hired us were either hiring in women’s history, or they were looking to diversify their faculty after not having been able to hire since the 1970s. I think the situation for young women on the academic job market has declined in the past few years–in part because people like me got hired 10 years ago, so there’s not as much of a sense of urgency to ensure an even playing field. (But that’s probably a subject for another day.)

Are there any readers at the conference? Interviewing for jobs, or interviewing candidates for jobs? What are you seeing and hearing out there?”

A funny thing happened on the way to the AHA this year -- American Historical Association staffer Robert B. Townsend issued his annual report on tenure-track employment in the field. Unsurprisingly, he concluded that holders of freshly minted doctorates face grim prospects. What raised my eyebrows -- and those of many others doing scholarship in academic labor -- was his insistence that the labor market for faculty in history is a matter of an "oversupply" of persons holding doctorates, and that the profession needs to control "the supply side of the market," i.e., "cut the number of students" in doctoral programs.

This is the sort of thing that used to get said all the time by disciplinary-association staffers -- as what I call part of a "second wave" of thinking about academic labor, emerging out of discredited supply-side thought dating back to the Reagan administration. Thanks to the third wave of thought arising from graduate students and contingent faculty in the academic labor movement, you just don't hear so much of this sort of thing anymore. In most fields, it's pretty well understood that the real issue is an undersupply of tenure-track jobs, i.e., that the issue needs to be addressed from the "demand side." There's no real oversupply of folks holding the Ph.D. because what's happened is an aggressive, intentional restructuring of demand by administrators -- in many fields, work that used to be done by persons holding the Ph.D. and on the tenure track is now done by persons without the terminal degree and contingently. Increasingly, even undergraduates are playing a role in this restructured "demand" for faculty work, participating in the instruction of other undergraduates.

In this context, it was a bit unsettling to read Townsend's 2010 analysis:

The near perpetual sense of crisis in history employment over the past 20 years had very little to do with a diminishing number of jobs, or even the growing use of part-time and contingent faculty. ... The primary problem today, as it was a decade ago, seems to lie on the supply side of the market -- in the number of doctoral students being trained, and in the skills and expectations those students develop in the course of their training.

Red flag, bull, etc....

[Dave Lieberson is an HNN intern.]

With the decade officially over we are forced to endure the lists created by mainstream media reminding us of the many notable people who have passed away. While they include many historically influential men and women like President Reagan and journalist Walter Cronkite, the lists are also inflated by the many not-so-relevant pop stars, actors, musicians and sports stars. Lost from the ranks of great historians in the last decade were, among others, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., author and historian of liberalism in the twentieth century; John Hope Franklin, historian of race relations and recipient of the Presidential Medal of Freedom; and Louis “Studs” Terkel, author of the Pulitzer Prize winning book, The Good War . But where do our gatekeepers of history stack up at the end of the decade?

If we just look to mainstream media, we would conclude that none of these historians passed away in the last ten years. NBC, in its retrospective of the last decade, formulated a list of the 104 most important people that the world lost. While you can find the likes of Anna Nicole Smith, Bernie Mac, Dale Earnhardt and even Oxi-Clean pusher Billy Mays, none of the above-referenced historians found their way onto the list. The death of John Hope Franklin appears in some publications among the notable deaths of 2009, but his name cannot be found on a single breakdown of notable deaths from the past ten years. Author and historian Louis “Studs” Terkel failed to appear on any list compiled on the internet by mainstream media outlets around the Country. Arthur Schlesinger received a mention in a New York Times article about his death earlier this decade. However, the same article mentioned 193 other notable deaths including 24 actors and actresses, 27 musicians, 14 athletes and 5 comedians.

Without question, the world lost many great men and women over the last ten years. One of the most disappointing aspects of these losses is the media’s decision to omit the deaths of some of last century’s greatest historians. Historians have been given the momentous task of reminding the public of what came before, and how we got to where we are today…but who will remember them?

Ihor Sevcenko, a leading scholar of Byzantine and Slavic history and literature who as a young man persuaded George Orwell to collaborate with him on a Ukrainian translation of “Animal Farm” for distribution to refugees, died at his home in Cambridge, Mass., on Dec. 26. He was 87.

The cause was bone cancer, said his daughter Catherine.

Mr. Sevcenko (pronounced EE-gore Shev-CHEN-ko) was unrivaled among Byzantinists for the breadth of his linguistic expertise and the variety of his interests.

Ukrainian by background and Polish by upbringing, he had command of a dozen Slavic and Western languages in their ancient, medieval and modern forms. His elegantly written essays dealt with, among other topics, late Byzantine intellectual life, early Slavic history and literature, Byzantine saints’ lives and epigraphy (inscriptions), and Byzantine-Slavic cultural relations.

Perhaps his most fascinating, if uncharacteristic, literary contribution came shortly after World War II, when he worked with Ukrainians stranded in camps in Germany for displaced persons.

In April 1946 he sent a letter to Orwell, asking his permission to translate “Animal Farm” into Ukrainian for distribution in the camps. The idea instantly appealed to Orwell, who not only refused to accept any royalties but later agreed to write a preface for the edition. It remains his most detailed, searching discussion of the book.

Ihor Ivanovic Sevcenko was born on Feb. 10, 1922, in the village of Radosc, not far from Warsaw. His parents were Ukrainian nationalists, and his father had served in the interior ministry of the short-lived independent Ukraine created after the Bolshevik revolution.

After graduating from the Adam Mickiewicz Gymnasium and Lyceum in Warsaw, where he began his studies of Greek, Latin and French, Mr. Sevcenko earned a doctorate in classical philology, ancient history and comparative linguistics from the Deutsche Karls-Universität in Prague in 1945, adding German and Czech to his store of languages.

It was on April 11, 1946, that he approached Orwell for the first time. “About the middle of February this year I had the opportunity to read ‘Animal Farm,’ ” he wrote. “I was immediately seized by the idea that a translation of the tale in Ukrainian would be of great value to my countrymen.”

Orwell agreed, and in the special preface he wrote for Mr. Sevcenko, he explained the intentions and political ideas behind “Animal Farm.” He also described the incident — the sight of a local farm boy whipping a horse — that gave him the idea of creating a fictional world in which oppressed animals rise up against their tormentors.

Orwell’s English version of the preface has been lost. It exists today as a retranslation from Mr. Sevcenko’s Ukrainian text.

Mr. Sevcenko, combining his father’s first name and his mother’s maiden name to form the pen name Ivan Cherniatyns’kyi, turned “Animal Farm” into “Kolhosp Tvaryn,” one of the first translations of the book into any foreign language. About 2,000 copies were distributed to Ukrainian readers. The remaining 1,500 copies, to Orwell’s disgust, were handed over by unwitting Americans to Soviet repatriation officers at the camps, who destroyed them immediately.

At the Université Catholique de Louvain in Belgium, Mr. Sevcenko pursued further studies in classical philology and Byzantinology and took part in the renowned seminar in Byzantine history presided over by the great Byzantinist Henri Grégoire. In 1949 he was awarded a doctorate in philosophy and letters.

That year he came to the United States and, after teaching ancient and Byzantine history at the University of California, Berkeley, accepted a post in the department of Slavic languages and literatures at the University of Michigan.

He taught from 1957 to 1965 at Columbia University, when he was named a senior scholar at Dumbarton Oaks, in Washington, a center of Byzantine studies in the United States.

In 1973 he joined the classics department at Harvard as the Dumbarton Oaks professor of Byzantine history and literature. He retired in 1992.

His three marriages, to Oksana Draj-Xmara, Margaret Bentley and the art historian Nancy Patterson, ended in divorce. In addition to his daughter Catherine, of Alexandria, Va., he is survived by another daughter, Elisabeth, of Brooklyn, and three grandchildren.

Mr. Sevcenko once wrote that historians fell into two categories: “the brightly colored butterfly flitting about over a flower bed” and “the crawling caterpillar whose worm’s-eye view covers the expanse of a single cabbage leaf.”

He was both, a restlessly inquisitive but painstaking scholar whose wide-ranging interests embraced the cultural resurgence of late Byzantium, the literary (as opposed to documentary) qualities of Byzantine saints’ lives, the editing of Byzantine texts, and the history and culture of Ukraine, which he addressed in the book “Ukraine Between East and West” (1996).

His essay collections include “Society and Intellectual Life in Late Byzantium” (1981), “Ideology, Letters and Culture in the Byzantine World” (1982) and “Byzantium and the Slavs in Letters and Culture” (1991). At his death he had completed, after 20 years, a critical edition and translation of “The Life of Emperor Basil I,” the only secular biography in Byzantine literature.

[Robert B. Townsend, the AHA’s assistant director for research and publications, received his PhD from George Mason University in May 2009. Directory Editor Liz Townsend and Staff Assistant Maddalena Marinari assisted with the data gathering for this report.]

The number of job openings in history plummeted last year, even as the number of new history PhDs soared. As a result, it appears the discipline is entering one of the most difficult academic job markets for historians in more than 15 years.

During 2008–09 job advertisements fell by 23.8 percent—from a record high of 1,053 openings in 2007–08 to 806 openings in the past year. This was the smallest number of positions advertised with the AHA in a decade.1 To make matters worse, a subsequent survey of advertisers indicates that about 15 percent of the openings were cancelled after the positions were advertised.

Even as the number of openings fell sharply, the number of new PhDs reported to the annual Directory of History Departments, Historical Organizations, and Historians increased by more than 17 percent, from 741 in the 2007–08 academic year to 869. This was the largest year-to-year increase since we began tabulating this information in the Directory in 1975. More than half the listing departments reported an increase in the number of PhDs conferred, as compared to less than a third reporting a decline...

Claims stating that Abraham Lincoln was a homosexual have been dismissed by acclaimed historian Harold Holzer.

Holzer, a scholar on Lincoln and the political culture of the American Civil War Era, trashed the claim made by playwright and AIDS activist Larry Kramer, who alleged that George Washington, Alexander Hamilton, Lewis and Clark and Lincoln were all interested in men.

"I had a private conversation with him [Kramer]," the New York Post quoted Holzer as saying.

"He admitted to me that he made the whole thing up. He said he made it up to raise consciousness," he added.

Holzer further explained: "That he is reviving this hoax is a little bizarre. For half his life, Lincoln shared his bed with other guys. It was the custom. People didn't have so many beds."