Say the line! “Faculty need to tell the truth about the academic job market.” Unobjectionable in itself, this is a constant refrain in online and print performances of academic self-criticism. Why? One implication is that faculty members have been cornering unwary bystanders to share the Good News about tenure-track jobs. Another implication is that the primary audience for this imagined mode of PhD recruitment is people who are highly suggestible and poorly informed, especially about the careers they plan on — perhaps young children, rather than educated adults. Though each implication evidently caters to certain vanities, anxieties, expectations, and prejudices, it is far from clear that either is true.

Current academic job-seekers are rightly dismissive of easy comparisons between the market of years past — the years their advisors most vividly remember — and its abject collapse since the pandemic. But it would be wrong to think that faculty, collectively, have presented the situation as particularly rosy for much of the last twenty years. Here are Anthony Grafton, then-President of the American Historical Association, and Robert B. Townsend — hardly firebrands or Cassandras — writing in Perspectives in October 2008 (before the effects of the financial crisis were fully felt):

In 2004, AHA staff found that almost two-thirds (63 percent) of the history PhDs reported to the Directory over the past 15 years had not found employment in a listing department or organization. Substantial numbers of those who did not wind up as professors became public historians or found other positions in history—sometimes at salaries and in working conditions that most professors can only envy. But a majority of those who actually completed their doctorates did not, so far as the AHA can tell, find jobs to which their training was strongly relevant.

The piece was entitled “The Parlous Paths of the Historical Profession,” and ended with a now all-too-familiar call for tenured faculty “to remind administrators that we cannot achieve economy and flexibility in the present at the cost of future academic generations.” A little over a year later, Townsend noted in the same venue that “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.”

This is not to downplay how much worse things are now. It is, rather, to point out that even in objectively much better times, the prevailing tone was still overwhelmingly negative. Townsend observes as much in the piece just quoted when he writes of “the near perpetual sense of crisis in history employment over the past 20 years,” i.e., 1990-2010. Getting a PhD, in the humanities disciplines or otherwise, has been a notoriously risky proposition for a very long time. A 2014 study on the professional “reproduction rate” of engineering professors summarized its findings thus:

We show that the reproduction rate in academia is very high. For example, in engineering, a professor in the US graduates 7.8 new PhDs during his/her whole career on average, and only one of these graduates can replace the professor’s position. This implies that in a steady state, only 12.8% of PhD graduates can attain academic positions in the USA. The key insight is that the system in many places is saturated, far beyond capacity to absorb new PhDs in academia at the rates that they are being produced. 

If these findings were followed by demands that engineering professors tell students the truth, or a public outcry against letting students pursue STEM degrees, I missed it.

In any case, I don’t know any history professor, at least in North America, who tells prospective PhD students to be confident, or even so much as hopeful, about their chances of getting an academic job, and few students who have discussed doctoral study with me are under any illusions on this point. (Leaning somewhat in the other direction, I have had to caution students against the idea that library, museum, private school, or junior college jobs — once many a candidate’s breezy “plan B” — are there for the taking.) It seems pertinent, too, that most students have themselves been taught, in some if not many of their courses, by precariously employed adjunct or part-time faculty. The wages of graduate school are there to be seen for anyone who cares to look at the conditions of their own education. Admittedly, I do know many students for whom the distinctions between part- and full-time, tenure- and non-tenure-track, and junior and senior faculty are extremely hazy. Perhaps even faculty who actively discourage students from entertaining thoughts of becoming academics are fighting more than just disinformation about tenure-track hiring trends.

(To pause for a moment: It’s worth thinking about what an odd circumstance this is, sociologically and psychologically: one’s professional duty to those one teaches is now widely understood to be dissuading promising candidates from pursuing the profession. It’s even odder when this understanding of ethical duty is juxtaposed with the equal and in some respects opposite imperative to advocate for the essential and enduring value and relevance of the discipline. Perhaps we’ll square that circle another time. The point is, this duty is now widely understood, and, what’s more, widely practiced.)

I know some other things, too. One is that a job candidate’s perceived capacity to recruit graduate students still figures in academic hiring decisions. Another is that graduate student supervision (that is, numbers of students supervised) is a standard and often crucial criterion of retention, tenure, and promotion for regular tenure-line faculty, to say nothing of its place in the evaluation of research chairs. At another level, departments gain or lose institutional favour with their graduate enrolment numbers. In many institutions, graduate program directors face constant calls from deans to improve their numbers, including by loosening admissions or program requirements so that enrolments can at least tread water even in shallower applicant pools. Externally, research funding agencies — at least in Canada — judge proposals in part by their potential for graduate recruitment and training (something that, incidentally, allows some universities to minimize their institutional responsibility for graduate funding). Why write a book when you can start a centre and fill it with research assistants? Why do mere work when you can build capacity? Such cynical or mindless initiatives can be resisted, but not without cost. To my mind, the surprising thing is not that faculty operating under these pressures (and given these incentives) should do as they’re bidden, but rather that so many don’t.

So perhaps rather than calling yet again for faculty to tell what is by now a long and eminently available truth about the academic job market, it would make more sense to attack the institutional pressures and material incentives that work against enlightenment on the ground. Get rid of graduate recruitment and supervision as criteria of hire, retention, tenure, or promotion. Get rid of “growing the graduate program” as a standing order for department chairs and program directors. Get rid of “building graduate training capacity” as a desideratum in faculty grant applications — at least until granting agencies show some interest in what the resulting PhDs are supposed to do with their lives. Get rid of “new graduate programs” as a staple of strategic plans. Attack the structural basis of the pyramid scheme, if that is what you think it is. The campaign might fail; at least it would be new.

But above all, get rid of pitches for “alt-ac” training as a raison d’être for PhD programs. If there is no academic purpose for the highest level of academic training, no scholarly rationale for doctoral study, better to shut programs down than to keep them limping along as costly, lengthy training for jobs that never needed PhDs to begin with, run by people who never held them anyway. If we’re in the truth-telling business, let’s tell this truth, too. The idea that we need to keep PhD programs even in the absence of academic jobs — and thus, by process of elimination, for the sake of non-academic employment training they can provide — is a bigger and more self-indulgent fantasy than the dream of a tenure-track job ever was. This, ultimately, is what the idea of a programmatic alt-ac path or a universal “plan B” (rather than myriad more or less happy non-academic job outcomes) represents: the illusion of a future for academic programs after academia.