In lieu of a full-length post here, here is a link to a full-length post I wrote for the North American Conference on British Studies blog, Broadsides. It’s one of a series looking at the state of British studies — considered rather more as a profession than as a discipline, if you take my meaning. It’s grim, but things are grim, and we’re at the point where we need to kill a lot of false hopes (transferable skills!) and optimistic misdirections (maybe alt-ac will justify us!) if we are at least going to grasp the magnitude of the problem. On that, I recommend the Canadian Historical Association’s report on the future of the history PhD in Canada, a subject easily forgotten between US- and UK-centric discussions but every bit as forlorn. Where there is a rich variety of job training schemes, but no jobs, there is no field. Importantly, there is nothing here unique to British history, and not much unique to the discipline of history itself. Science departments are not safer than humanities departments, nor are their graduates necessarily better off. Show me a society that divests itself of learning, and I’ll show you a society that no longer learns.