On Class in Class

Alright.  Yes, am talking more about class in the professoriate than in the classroom (or about the socioeconomics of my students).  But "On Class in Class" seemed the best title on offer.  Very classy, no?  Pun intended.

I am fortunate.  I have a tenure-track job.  Despite spending far too long in grad school (or at least far longer than I intended), I finished my Ph.D. without incurring any debt.  Nor do I have any college loans to pay off.  Thanks to the research of Dr. Karen Kelsky (consultant to academic job-seekers), it is clear that many grad students - including in the humanities - are diving deeply into debt in the hopes of landing the ever-more-elusive tenure-track job.  I was raised in a comfortably middle class family that valued education (though "practical" fields like business, law, and medicine were valued more highly than the humanities).  As a historian, I am well aware that humanities degrees (bachelor through the doctorate) were long the province of the already economically comfortable.  Engineering and the sciences were initially swamped with upwardly-mobile members of society from 1900 or so (or after the GI Bill, when college education was made far more accessible in the US), practical fields of study for practically-minded people who saw attending university primarily as a way to improve one's socioeconomic prospects.  It seems only in the past half-century that doctorates in the humanities - and with them entree to the humanities professoriate - were attainable to scions of the working class, first-generation Americans, and first-generation college graduates.  Members of the American upper-crust dominated the big-name roster at least as recently as a generation ago.  Such folk could scoff at the idea of needing to make a living from one's salary ('That's what the family trust fund is for, my boy").  If humanities graduate programs contract in the near future, among the casualties will likely be students who do not have significant familial resources to draw on, leading to a re-patricianizing of liberal arts faculty.  As doctoral candidate Kate Bahn argued recently, if social mobility is a positive good, "academia should be amplifying that goal, not working against it.  That means that students and faculty should represent society as a whole, not just a cross-section of scholars lucky enough to come from certain stock."

(Roman Senators, aka Patricians)

Lest I be accused of Patrician navel-gazing and elitist lamentation-ing about the fate of the humanities, recent studies indicate that the "War on Poverty" inaugurated by LBJ a half-century ago has not been won.  Far from it.  And its not just because of "lazy" poor people - particularly racial minorities - who are not being entrepreneurial enough to go out and get the work work where it is waiting to be got.  Its because teamwork and fair-play has been superceded by the Gordon Gecko or "Wolf" of Wall Street.  The "Me" generation that helped elect Ronald Reagan needs to look back - or be succeeded by a new generation - to the "We" generation (Tom Brokaw's "Greatest Generation") that grew up during the Great Depression, banded together to fight World War II, and reaped the rewards of government investment in society during the 1950s.  If we do not pull together, we will be pulled apart.

Parting Shot

Your obedient servant,

The History Major

On the Humanities Ph.D. Jobs Crisis

I admit: I was tempted to title this post "Vom Kriege."  After all, going on the academic job market feels like going to war, and not just a war when one side or the other will win (granting to you a one-in-two chance of your side winning, even if you perish gloriously on the champs de mars).  More on the odds below....  In my years on the humanities job market and thinking - and losing sleep - about it, I've amassed (alright, accrued) a few thoughts about it.  Included will be some remarks on how to "fix" (or at least ameliorate) the crisis in the humanities professoriate.

Unless you happen to be a historian of China (at least this year), the odds are not in your favor to get a tenure-track job in the humanities.  Typing those words reminds me of "Hunger Games," in which two dozen teenagers are thrown into an arena and expected to fight one another to the death (with one-in-24 odds of surviving... or one-in-12 if you are named "Katniss" or "Peeta").  Indeed, it seems like the odds are worse than being selected as a "tribute" in Panem; 100+ applicants per job in American history, ~20 first-round interview candidates, ~3 on-campus finalists = less than a 3% chance of receiving a job offer per job applied for.  Fortunately, someone else wrote a knock-down-drag-out article about how fighting your way through the humanities job market to a tenure-track future is rather like surviving "Hunger Games."  Even if you win your way through the carnage, many state universities are actively culling humanities departments' faculty tenure-lines in favor of increased spending on dorms or sports (or basic cutbacks in higher education spending).  And if one wants to get rid of tenured faculty, get rid of the department entirely.

Here are some of my thoughts about how to solve some of these issues (for any prospective deans or university presidents who want to be consciously pro-faculty):

1) Cut back on some of those "vice provosts" and "associate deans."  Not my idea.  Thank (or blame) political scientist Benjamin Ginsberg and his Fall of the Faculty book.  For each of those high-paid administrators - and the support staff that make them feel powerful - one could pay for two (or three) junior, tenure-track faculty.  N.B. If I am ever one of those high-paid administrators, my apologies in advance.  I promise I will be doing my best to implement the above.

2) Understand that critical thinking skills are important.  Certain highly-populated nations produce far more mathematically- and scientifically-inclined students (and grad students) than the United States (with its deeply problematic public school system) is likely to be able to do anytime soon.  Yet the U.S. still attracts thousands of talented people seeking graduate degrees in the sciences and engineering (who often have a sense of plagiarism/independent research that does not fly with American doctoral research standards).  Along the same lines, what the U.S. (or "the West," if you prefer) can still offer is training (education, if you will) in critical thinking.  Such independent thinking is crucial to - if not solely the property of - immersion in humanities disciplines, as well as (arguably) for a healthy democratic society.  In other words, I want to argue that majoring in a humanities discipline is more than about learning to appreciate "the meaning(s) of life" as an intrinsic value.  But it remains to someone more witty and persuasive than I to "weaponize" a sense of how to apply the humanities (at least at the undergraduate level) to the workplace.  It does not of course help that newspapers (that great employer of people who think critically, track down sources, question witnesses, and know how to turn a phrase in a succinct fashion) seem to be going the way of the dodo in favor of blogs (which anyway can type, regardless of the effectiveness of the spellchecker on their computer).

3) Faculty: Lest administrators claim I am dumping on them unnecessarily to the exclusion of the professoriate, here is some medicine for you (ok, us).  One of the ways that we - particularly those of us who are tenured "deadwood" who have not produced a book in a decade or an article in years - can help out with this situation is to consider accepting - slightly - lower salaries in favor of hiring another assistant professor or two.  I'm not asking you to sacrifice alone... even at a teaching school four or five full professors who "tithe" academically can enable the funding of a tenure-track assistant professor.  Yes, I agree that the bigwig sports coaches and provosts can afford to tighten their belts far easier than you, we need to put our money where our mouths are.

4) Point two for faculty.  Consider (at least for a little while) ways to make your discipline more "applied" in the classroom.  No, I am not asking you to capitulate to the semi-washed, backwards sports cap wearing masses and only offer classes in say sports or military history.  However, in this era of hyper-practicality among undergraduates afraid to graduate into their parents' basement if they take the wrong courses or the commit to the wrong major, many college students are leaving the humanities courses (and majors).  If your department needs to fill the seats each semester (and your college's core curriculum does not require enough world history courses) or the faculty tenure-lines get cut, think of ways to fill those seats.

Parting Shot

May you find ways to influence the odds ever more in your favor.

Your obedient servant,

The History Major

On Liminality

Today's post will be on a much more personal note than the recent run of job-related ruminations.  Let's talk about "liminality," or the sense of ambiguity or disorientation that many immigrants (and children of immigrants) experience at trying to fit into a new culture while retaining some of the values and/or mindsets of a previous culture.  Like Dr. Spock (the Vulcan, not the child psychologist), I have always been a child of two worlds.  I am simultaneously Asian and American, American and Asian.  I should be a happily-assimilated fourth-generation Japanese American and happily interracially married and "lazy like only a good native-born American can be," but (thanks in no small part to the Second World War) I am pushed-and-pulled between second- and fourth-generational status.  Raised with a strong dose of Confucian filiopiety and the Protestant (work) ethic, I was also surrounded by a culture in which "hyphenated Americanism" (acknowledging multiple, simultaneous, and legitimate identities) was downright un-American.  How does one square that circle?  No doubt some in my situation take refuge in a sense of cosmopolitanism, of being "a citizen of the world."  I on the other hand - Sisyphus-like - endeavored to bear the burden of the world (two worlds, actually) upon my semi-broad shoulders, of living up to parental and personal expectations and duties.  Eventually, frail humanity rears its Janus-faced head, and one has the option of the blue pill (way of the "Angry Asian Man" and/or loveless Korean guy) or the red pill of going down the rabbit hole and embracing one's liminality.

From my early teen years through college, I did not like to look in the mirror, because to do so was to recognize that I was ugly.  By ugly, I mean not blond-haired and blue-eyed like the A-list Hollywood stars and many actors on television commercials.  Well, I also did not have the sharp nose that could singlehandedly break through an iceberg and thereby save thousands of lives on the Titanic, nor was I six-feet-plus tall like a basketballer or broad like a footballer.  Like Stephen Colbert - even before the advent of the "Colbert Report" on Comedy Central - I did not see race; I tried to imagine myself as white, or better yet, invisible.  Fortunately, a direct descendant of Calvinist theologian and College of New Jersey (Princeton today) President Jonathan Edwards (re)assured me that I was "the whitest guy.on campus."  What a relief.  I was so (outwardly) comfortably a part of the model (or invisible) minority that I was in fact, visibly white.  Yet I failed to follow one of the acceptable Asian paths to financial security and family pride (what I've dubbed the "Asian trinity"): doctor, lawyer, engineer.  No, since my preteen years I've had a strong vocational calling towards academia (and, worst of all, the HUMANITIES!).  As a hetero American-Asian male, should one date "within" or "without" one's ethnicity?  Parental wisdom: "Don't date/marry a white girl.  She'll divorce you and take all your money."  Fortunately, we in the humanities don't earn any (large sums of) money that we can speak of....

(The very WASPy Rev. Jonathan Edwards)

Until recently - with the publication of Yale Law Professor Amy Chua's Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother - it was difficult to articulate this sense of liminality to WASPy friends.

Parting Shot

In case you did not get enough of Professor Chua's cultural essentialism the first time 'round, she is publishing a new book comparing Jews, Chinese, Nigerians, and other upwardly-mobile ethnic groups.

Your obedient servant,

The History Major

Reflections from the AHA

Humanities PhD job marketeers inhabit a "brave new world" in their quest to land a tenure-track job.  My experience last weekend at the American Historical Association (AHA) annual meeting cemented this impression in my mind.  Not only are increasing numbers of departments selecting to preempt the AHA interview by setting up initial and on-campus interviews before January, I understand that those brave (and well-endowed) departments that pony up the cash to meet with candidates at the AHA have hit the warp-speed button on their decisions.  I recall hearing that departments would get back to me within two weeks of the AHA... departments that wanted to expedite the process to selecting a finalist to offer the job to.  That was so last year.  This is now.  Would you believe receiving a notification of "thanks-but-no-thanks" 24- or 48-hours after the conference wrapped up?  Oh yes, in case you needed your morale boosted at this frigid time of year, the number of job searches in history (at least) is down 7.3% this year.

Let me confess: I never had the advantage of mock interviews at my grad school (one year none were offered, another I was out-of-state - at an interview, funnily enough - when they occurred).  I recommend that you take advantage of any offered.  If none are offered, ask your friends/colleagues/frienemies to interrogate you.  Here's a helpful article about mock interviews: http://www.insidehighered.com/advice/2014/01/06/essay-all-kinds-interviews-academic-job-candidates

Parting Shot

The only unambiguously positive thing I can write for the nonce is: "Yes, Virginia, it is a LOT less stressful interviewing job candidates than it is being interviewed."  Especially in the AHA job center where you can hear (and sometimes see) the interview going on next door.  No snark intended.

Your obedient servant,

The History Major

Teaching where the students are

In a brief follow-up to my last post in December, I want to juxtapose that post about the history job market and interviewing with a just-hot-on-the-internet (as opposed to hot off the presses) post about the importance of preparing grad student job candidates to interview at and engage in the teaching focus of teaching-intensive institutions by Paula Krebs, Dean of the College of Humanities and Social Sciences at Bridgewater State College.

Here it is: https://chroniclevitae.com/news/241-training-ph-d-s-to-teach-where-the-jobs-are?cid=at&utm_source=at&utm_medium=en

Also, here's a report from a panel at the AHA annual meeting about the first years on the tenure-track at teaching-intensive institutions:

https://chroniclevitae.com/news/248-how-to-survive-your-first-years-of-teaching

Parting Shot

The next post will (likely) be about liminality.

Your obedient servant,

The History Major