Bessner and Brenes on collapse of job markets

Here, below, is the text of the Daniel Bessner / Michael Benes "Moral Stain
on the Profession" essay on the collapse of the job market in History
(latest Chronicle of Higher Education).  It's quite forceful, and mutatis
slightly mutandis seems applicable in fields like Classics, Sociology,
Modern Languages, and so on.   Daniel Immerwahr
<https://nam04.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fus.macmillan.com%2Fbooks%2F9780374172145&amp;data=02%7C01%7CCLASSICS-L%40lsv.uky.edu%7Ca9ccdaabc6194c01528608d6ca86e414%7C2b30530b69b64457b818481cb53d42ae%7C0%7C0%7C636919078044026232&amp;sdata=d5frCfclXtKziIkmILPhZ8rfiSfRqMjGTOOxWRxuy0c%3D&amp;reserved=0>at Northwestern immediately
followed up on Twitter to say "A few crucial arguments in this article...:

1) Alt-ac strategies are a capitulation. They accept the premise that there
are "no jobs" when actually there are, they've just been adjunctified.
2) The professoriate has let universities do this without much resistance.
It must, via its professional organizations, threaten strikes to prevent
decent jobs from evaporating. And it should have been doing this for a long
while.
3) And a big reason this hasn't happened is organizations are dominated by
tenured profs. You can see this as a meritocracy. But if you don't think
merit governs the system, it starts to look more like an oligarchy."

I've linked to two fine books at Bessner's and Immerwahr's names.  Good
historians both.

BCC I'm copying friends who've been impressively active in dealing with
crises in our own field, who are likely way ahead of me about possible
action.  The structural challenges are massive, as universities,
departments, and senior colleagues have adjusted to massive financial
cutbacks, and there's a certain amount of powerlessness at each level.  But
things are arguably so bad that enlightened administrations somewhere might
want to chart  a way back to sanity.

Immerwahr's point 1) has long been true.  There plenty of "jobs" for people
ready to be freeway fliers for a pittance, and every six or so adjunct
taught courses could become one-year appointments.  The profession has been
forcibly socialized into accepting this state of affairs.

Dan

04/26/2019 *A Moral Stain on the Profession*
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*As the humanities collapse, it’s time to name and shame the culprits*

By Daniel Bessner
<https://nam04.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.cornellpress.cornell.edu%2Fbook%2F%3Fgcoi%3D80140104396220&amp;data=02%7C01%7CCLASSICS-L%40lsv.uky.edu%7Ca9ccdaabc6194c01528608d6ca86e414%7C2b30530b69b64457b818481cb53d42ae%7C0%7C0%7C636919078044026232&amp;sdata=z%2B%2Bfyd9TjvF%2BQ32ckD1hXRr%2FQ56lhzsVyetbwXxy7eo%3D&amp;reserved=0> and Michael
Brenes April 26, 2019

Regardless of whether they study ancient Byzantium, colonial Latin America,
or the modern United States, most historians can agree
on one thing: The academic job market is abysmal. To even call it a
"market" is an exaggeration; it’s more like a slaughterhouse. Since the
Great Recession of 2008, there have been far, far more historians than
jobs. 2016-17 was the worst academic year for history  positions in 30
years, and though there was a slight uptick in 2017-18, this improvement,
as the recent jobs report released by the  American Historical Association
notes, did "not indicate any sustained progress recovering from the 2008-9
recession." To be a
historian today is, for most people, to be jobless, suffused with anxiety
that one has wasted years of one’s life training for a position that will
never materialize.

The American Historical Association, and the tenured professoriate that
mostly composes it, has done frustratingly little to ameliorate this
situation. Though the AHA is the major professional organization in the
discipline, it has displayed a marked unwillingness — or, perhaps,
inability — to rally historians against an unjust labor system. Instead,
the organization has responded to what must be seen as a social,
psychological, and economic crisis with solutions that would offend even
Candide’s Dr. Pangloss, who famously affirmed that "all is for the best" in
"the best of all possible worlds." For instance, in the above-mentioned
jobs report, the AHA proclaims that the poor job market, while lamentable,
has nonetheless "forced a recognition of the tremendous range of careers
historians have long pursued" outside
the academy. In essence, the group has responded to the collapse of the
historical profession by telling people that the best — really, only —
solution to the crisis is to find non-university jobs. This is not so much
a solution as a surrender.

For decades, members of the historical profession have acquiesced in the
neoliberalization of the university system, which has encouraged false —
and selfserving— notions of "meritocracy" to dominate thinking about those
who "succeeded" and those who "failed" on the academic job market. Indeed,
the majority of AHA leaders are themselves tenured academics, often from
elite universities, who
have been spared the market’s many indignities. If the leadership more
genuinely reflected the historical profession, perhaps we would have long
ago abandoned the quiescent path that endangers the fate of academic
history writing in the United States — a genre that might very well
disappear.

Given the magnitude of the discipline’s collapse, the AHA must address
head-on the profession’s systemic inequality. Thus far it has failed. In
its misguided emphasis on "alt-ac," the AHA reinforces a stratified and
unequal system of academic labor and
obfuscates the structural problems inherent in the job market. Many
professional historians, especially those of the younger generation, are
not on the tenure track (part-time positions account for 47 percent of
university faculty overall); the
organization and its mission must change to reflect this disturbing fact.

What makes the AHA’s inaction all the more inexcusable is that the
employment crisis is not new. As far back as 1972, The New York Times
reported that the AHA was "facing open discontent in its ranks as a result
of the recession, academic budget
trimming and an oversupply of trained historians," which engendered a "job
crisis" that showed little sign of abating. Nevertheless, for nearly a
half-century, historians have failed to organize to halt the disappearance
of positions. This must now change.
In short, the AHA must become an organization that serves the needs of the
many and not the few. It must try to reverse the damage caused by decades
of unnecessary neoliberal austerity, corporatization, and adjunctification;
it must transform itself
into an advocate of contingent labor, of those academics presently lost to
a capricious and inequitable system; and it must recruit non-tenure-track
scholars into its leadership class. To achieve those goals, we propose the
following ideas.

*'Alt-Ac is not the answer'*

The AHA’s focus on "career diversity," or "alt-ac" — a term that eludes
definition — legitimizes inaction on behalf of the profession’s winners. As
it stands, gestures to altac careers are a form of boot-strappism and
market-Darwinism that provide no consolation or concrete assistance to an
embattled labor force. To alleviate the conditions of a lost generation of
historians, the AHA does little but offer dubious "resources" — syllabi,
workshops, publications — that in the end are characterized primarily by
rhetorical encouragement. Historians don’t need assistance transitioning
away from stable academic jobs; we need stable academic jobs. And while the
AHA
offers "Career Diversity Implementation Grants" to departments re-thinking
how they teach graduate students, these programs amount to little more than
job-retraining programs. There is no reason that someone needs to receive a
Ph.D. in history to become a high-school teacher or museum curator, two of
the most commonly cited alt-ac careers. This is not to disparage those
jobs, but only to underline that they are careers with different norms,
standards, and training programs. In fact, it is insulting to teachers and
curators that the AHA assumes that scholars will be able to move easily
into those positions.

Indeed, none of the AHA’s "career diversity" programs seem to appreciate
the fact tat much of the humanities alt-ac market is itself beleaguered,
rattled by financial cuts and dependence on part-time, low-wage work. Take
jobs in archives and libraries. Outside of subject specialists and
curatorial positions, which are headquartered mostly at sizable academic
libraries with adequate funding (of which
there are increasingly few), there are hardly any full-time entry-level
jobs in libraries and archives.

The AHA’s current concentration on alt-ac shifts the blame for an abysmal
job market from the universities who have hollowed out their labor forces
onto a generation of underemployed scholars. While the AHA did not cause
this crisis, its focus on alt-ac diverts attention from the needless
austerity programs responsible for the present catastrophe. Moreover, by
legitimizing the status quo, alt-ac forces those with graduate degrees in
history to compete against one another for scarce resources. Such
initiatives encourage Ph.D.s to look for jobs for which they are not
trained and which they do not want, sowing antagonism rather than fostering
the solidarity that is
necessary to overturn a patently unjust system.

*Equitable Job Postings, Interview Practices, and Graduate-School
Statistics*

The AHA exerts almost no oversight in regard to the jobs offered to
historians; universities freely post positions that they should be ashamed
to advertise. To take an egregious example: in 2010, East Tennessee State
University posted an advertisement
for a job in which the winning canidate would teach six courses a year for
$24,000 plus benefits. And East Tennessee State is hardly the only
offender. In January 2019, the University of Arizona advertised a
three-year position for director of a "public
history collaborative." The successful candidate — who should "have
produced historical work of recognized excellence and have experience in
fundraising, grantwriting, and project management," and who should also
"have significant and
acclaimed teaching experience" — would lead the program while teaching four
courses a year and producing "scholarship of engagement" (whatever that
means).

Examples like these are legion.

Applying for temporary, low-paying positions is a time-consuming process.
Take a 2017 advertisement posted by the University of Tennessee at
Chattanooga for a 4/4, one-year lectureship in U.S. history. Though the job
is a temporary teaching position, the ad requires a cover letter, CV,
graduate transcripts, teaching philosophy, sample syllabi, student
evaluations, writing sample, and three references. Similarly, Mount Holyoke
College recently advertised a one-year, nonrenewable position in European
and Jewish history, for which the college requested a cover letter, CV,
writing sample, evidence of teaching effectiveness, sample syllabi, three
references, and two
additional documents: a teaching philosophy and a diversity statement.
Putting all of these materials together requires a significant degree of
unpaid labor that for most candidates will never be compensated. It is
obscene to require such elaborate
applications for nonpermanent positions.

Search committees must become cognizant of the ways in which such jobs
reinforce inequality in the profession. That they haven’t yet done so
reflects the dominance of the tenured in the workings of the job market, of
those ensconced in a system that believes paying one’s dues — taking
substandard, temporary work — is the sacrifice one must make to work in the
modern university. The AHA — and tenured professors more generally — must
reject and dispel such thinking. While the AHA cannot, of course, control
what jobs universities advertise or how they advertise them, it should name
and shame colleges that ask historians to work difficult (or impossible)
jobs for peanuts. It should encourage universities to stop asking
candidates to spend an inordinate amount of time putting together materials
to apply for jobs that everyone knows are crummy and exploitative. An
AHA-published "shame list" would expose
the institutions and departments that post job ads which are clearly
inequitable. Over time, such a list might serve to arrest such egregious
practices.

Some history departments are at long last recognizing that most job
candidates have neither the time nor the money to travel to Chicago (where
AHA 2019 was held) or a similar city to chase the prospect of a job that
might — just might! — pay them a living wage. Skype, Zoom, or telephone
interviews should not simply be offered as alternatives to in-person
interviews; the AHA must mandate them. The AHA, in other words, must
acknowledge that the conference interview is a relic of a bygone era and
must change its policy to reflect that fact.

Finally, the AHA should urge history departments that have Ph.D. programs
to publish comprehensive statistics on job placements that clearly
delineate between tenure-track, non-tenure track, visiting professor,
post-doctoral, and non-academic positions. Such statistics will help
provide present and incoming graduate students with important information
and will further underline to tenured historians and the
public at large the severity of the present crisis.

*Build Networks Across the Humanities and Social Sciences*

The AHA should also work to institutionalize networks of solidarity within
and outside the discipline. First, it should develop creative initiatives
to connect tenure-track with non-tenure-track faculty members. We are all,
for example, wary of "manels" — conference panels that consist only of men.
The AHA should prompt historians to be similarly skeptical of panels that
include only tenure-track faculty members.

Furthermore, to build solidarity, the AHA should hold events throughout the
year that bring all types of faculty members together. And, most important,
it should pressure history departments to invite non-tenure-track faculty
members to departmental meetings, so that they don’t remain invisible, as
is usually the case. Tenure-track and tenured faculty members, in short,
must recognize that they share interests with those who have not been lucky
enough to land tenure-track positions. To help them do so, the AHA should
publicly shame those who refuse to integrate non-tenure-track faculty
members into professional events and decision-making processes. Nontenure-
track faculty members are in no way "lesser" than those on the tenure line,
and the professoriate must stop treating them as such.
Second, the AHA should work with other professional associations — the
Modern Language Association, the American Anthropological Association, the
American Political Science Association, the International Studies
Association, the American Library Association, the Society of American
Archivists — to address systematically the job crisis that affects us all.
Building inter- and transdisciplinary solidarity would be an effective
means to pressure universities to recommit to hiring tenure-track faculty.
Solidarity would also provide the communal basis for a collective strike,
one that must be supported — indeed, led — by tenured faculty members. Can
anyone
imagine how universities would respond if members of all these associations
threatened to strike? If we wish to reverse the decline of the academic job
market, we must make use of our labor power. We might even consider
creating an Industrial Workers of the World-type organization for the
humanities and social sciences.

*Transforming the AHA’s Leadership Class*

Currently, the overwhelming majority of the members of the AHA’s governing
council are tenured or tenure-track professors. In the future, the
association must make a significant effort to recruit non-tenure-track and
independent scholars into its leadership ranks. As things stand, most
historians will not find stable, full-time academic employment. For that
reason, it is crucial that the interests of the majority
be represented at the highest institutional levels. This would provide
non-tenuretrack faculty members with access to the AHA’s bully pulpit,
which could be used to highlight the collapse of the job market and to
advocate for an increase in tenuretrack hiring. As such, the AHA should
consider holding more open and democratic elections instead of relying
primarily on a Nominating Committee (composed mostly of tenured faculty)
that determines who will run for AHA offices.

We are recent Ph.D.s in history who have stable jobs. But both of us also
spent years on the job market and appreciate the intense psychological
effects — insomnia, depression, anxiety — that come from being constantly
worried about finding fulltime and fulfilling employment. The situation in
which historians and other humanists and social scientists find themselves
cannot be allowed to continue. We believe that the most important role
members of the tenured professoriate can adopt in coming years is that of
organizer of and advocate for their contingent colleagues.

Those with professional power can no longer confine themselves to promoting
the latest scholarship, awarding prizes, and holding conferences. The AHA
must instead adopt a more active role that challenges the casualization of
labor that has degraded academic work. The jobs crisis is not natural; it
is a crisis of political economy caused by a series of decisions made by
corporate, governmental, and, yes, academic elites over the past 50 years.
It is fully in our power to reverse these decisions. The future of History
— and, perhaps, of history — is at stake.

Daniel Bessner is an assistant professor in American foreign policy at the
University of Washington.
Michael Brenes is a lecturer in global affairs and a senior archivist at
Yale University.

4/26/2019 A Moral Stain on the Profession - The Chronicle of Higher
Education
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