Much Love to This Year’s Job Hunters
More Drivel from the New York Times
As this year’s job hunting season ramps up, I figured some clarity from Marc Bousquet might be welcome. ?This post is from his blog, and he wrote it back in April:
Why golly, the problem with the university is that there aren?t enough teaching positions out there to employ all of our excess doctorates?Mark C. Taylor says: ?Most graduate programs in American universities produce a product for which there is no market (candidates for teaching positions that do not exist).? Because there are just?too many folks with Ph.D.?s out there, ?there will always be too many candidates for too few openings.?
Um, nope. Wrong. _The New York Times_?loves this bad theory and has been pushing it for decades, but the reality is clear.
In fact, there are plenty of teaching positions to absorb all of the ?excess doctorates? out there. At least 70 percent of the faculty are nontenurable. In many fields, most of the faculty don?t hold a Ph.D. and aren?t studying for one. By changing their hiring patterns over the course of a few years New York or California ? either one ? alone could absorb most of the ?excess? doctorates in many fields.
Please, please, please remember this as you launch forth into the application process: the deck is in fact stacked, and you don’t lose any real brilliance if you miss the ever-shrinking train this year. ?I’m rooting for all of you at UGA, both EMUS and otherwise.
Tear ‘em up!
by
Count me in as one who has bought into the fear-mongering on this one. Mostly because it is actually true in my field, though it may not be on the wider university and college level. As seminary budgets shrink, so does the priority for new hires in homiletics. Faculty searches are being suspended. As the economy continues to falter, more tenured profs are holding onto their positions in the hopes that their retirement accounts will rebound. Ten years ago was supposed to be the beginning of a mass exodus for retirees in the practical theological fields. It hasn’t happened and unfortunately for me, it’s at the wrong time.
Oh and one more thing. Folks with D.Min degrees – a really superfluous, non-academic, revenue-generating degree for theological institutions – are getting jobs as professors in theological education ahead of qualified PhD’s (similar to the BA’s and Master’s degree profs on the university level), perpetuating the stigma of the practical theological fields as not the “real work” of academic theology. Hogwash! Ok, my rant ends here.
Preach it, Rich! (Sorry. The joke was there. I was too weak to turn away.)
I think Bousqet’s point is (and you hit this in your second comment) that folks have good reason to fear but that the hand-wringing at the top is at best bad-faith excuse-making and at worst outright duplicity. As he notes in the little snippet I posted, some shifts in hiring practices could give the lie to the “excess Ph.D” claim in a hurry. But that, I think, would take some larger cultural and political commitments to education as something at comparable in importance to military empire.
My response to the “excess Phd” claim is this, the neo-liberal hiring practices are to blame. What I mean by a “neo-liberal hiring practices” is that you have an abundance of part-time faculty (many with PhD.s) at many institutions. You hire multiple part-time instructors instead of one full-time professor. In many ways college professors are the new migrant worker. You have so many teaching at part-time at 2 or 3 institutions. Kinda hard to get tenure roaming from place to place. So yeah I think that it is closer to outright duplicity.
Phil,
You’re right, and Bousquet has been hammering on that bell for quite some time now. You ought to check his blog out–it’s some good, cathartic angry blogging.