British Academia: abandoning the next generation
Pithy summary by Maria Pretzler of the situation facing junior academics in the UK today (and applicable in the US too, from what I hear):
The fate of young academics in UK universities looks increasingly bleak: the chance to reach paid employment as an academic in the Arts and Humanities increasingly depends not only on talent and a willingness to work hard, but also on access to considerable funds.
The problem is that universities increasingly expect early career academics to take on heavy teaching loads for a pittance, and often such jobs are paid only for eight or nine months. Yet, when those same institutions hire people for ‘real jobs’, they expect CVs with large amounts of research – the kind of CV you can’t achieve when you don’t actually get paid research time.
I know this situation well myself. Compared to a number of my peers, I have been very lucky. A mere year of employment uncertainty – little bits of teaching here and there at two institutions and two part time office jobs – was followed by a year’s postdoc and now my three year post at Oxford. I am in a better position than many. But I still have anxieties. My publication credits are not as healthy as I would like, and I’m prone to self-criticism on that front. Why haven’t I written more? Why did I waste all that time? Why did it take me three years after the submission of my thesis to submit the MS of my first book, given it’s a (developed and expanded) version of my thesis? Then I remember how for the year after I submitted my PhD, I had panic attacks because, despite picking up bits of teaching at two different universities (in two different towns!) and working 18-20 hours a week in an office job, I was barely making ends meet, and my meagre savings had been exhausted by personal circumstances meaning I spilled over from my intended 3.25 years for my PhD to almost-four. I was certainly not in poverty, but the psychological toll of having no safety net was quite heavy. I was too tired during all this to make much progress on writing, particularly since I had to spend so much time filling in endless job applications. I was lucky enough to be offered a post within a year; many of my friends have carried on working in this exhausting, miserable way, where you are paid by the hour to do a little university teaching, which will probably not entirely compensate you for your teaching prep and will definitely not fund your research efforts, and you fill up the holes in your bank account by doing fairly menial work. There’s no shame in honest labour, and I didn’t think that I was “too good” for data entry at £6.50 or £7.50 an hour – that’s above minimum wage, after all. But when you have spent years developing a particular skill set, it’s frustrating not to be able to use it: particularly when you know you won’t be able to get the job you need to be able to exercise those skills unless you amass more publishing credits.
Well-meaning older academics, who pretty much always got permanent jobs straight out of their PhDs, would advise me (and friends in similar situations) to write in the evenings and at weekends. Of course, that’s what many of us did. But I think these academics also don’t realise how tiring (and by this I mean not only physically, but intellectually and creatively exhausting) it is to work all day in a job where the only tasks are simple and repetitive, and where when your wage slip comes in you realise that you’re poorer than you were when you were a grad student, because you have new expenses like council tax to pay. Or how tiring it is to receive rejection after rejection for jobs – jobs that often aren’t even very good jobs, and in fact seem designed to squeeze the maximum amount of teaching out of a temporary faculty member for the least amount of money, but that receive dozens or hundreds of applications because the market is just that bad. Or to lie in bed thinking: what if this is as good as it gets?
That last part’s the real killer, of course. What if your prospects never get any better? When do you say: enough is enough, and give up the dream of academia? It’s easy enough to say, when you’re not in this situation, “oh, I would give myself __ months and then move on”, but given that academic culture – particularly in the humanities, it seems to me – implicitly encourages seeing academia almost as a vocation, giving up the dream of an academic career is not just a disappointment: it can cause a profound crisis of identity. These short term job contracts make the decision to cut loose even more difficult, because you’re still connected to an institution; you are so close to your dream job (or at least a job that would get you one step closer to the dream) that you can taste it. You have colleagues. You have students. You have fleeting moments of feeling like a professional academic. But they don’t last, and every day brings you closer to your final pay cheque and another blank space on your CV.
Having now had two years in continuous employment, in a job which is well compensated and that I love, I know that I couldn’t go back to that kind of precarious existence. I hope that after this, I will find a job that lasts. I have some reason to hope: I’ve used my time here reasonably well, in career development terms, and I have a better CV than before I came here. However, nothing in this job market is certain, and plenty of well-qualified people are unemployed. All I know is that I’ve given myself a bottom line: that I deserve better than working for scraps. But if no job comes up on the horizon, who knows how long this resolution will hold?
Rachel E. Moss 
I agree with so much of what you said! In my year-ish of uncertainty (i was a ‘research assistant’ paid by the hour so, like you, not in poverty but hardly secure!) I got a lot of well meaning, but ultimately unhelpful, ‘tips’ from senior colleagues who simply did not understand that i WAS applying for every academic job, and many unacademic ones too. I WAS doing as much writing as i could (not much, but I tried) I WAS still doing conferences (despite the fees and lack of funds) and I WAS checking every job site. Several simply believed, blindly, that i would get a job if i worked hard enough and didn’t seem to take into account how VERY long it takes to apply for jobs, and that most lecturer/teaching fellow jobs have several hundred applicants, all very well qualified.
That period was particularity bleak, luckily my institution gave my ‘honourary’ status (ie no money but access to an academic email and to the library/ online journals) but i know of lot of people who, in that 6 months-year after finishing, are pretty much abandoned. Keeping going at that point, was very hard, there is very little support and feedback in that stage, and I was always wondering what i had done wrong, if that a typo on a covering letter had been the reason i didn’t get an interview, if my subject was too small/uninteresting or if i was simply not good enough.
Again, I’m lucky, I had a temporary teaching post in one amazing institution, thought it meant moving across the country on less than 2 weeks notice…which would not be possible for anyone with family commitments. And it meant an unpaid summer between that job ending and my new one starting (which is ridiculously common) I’m now in a 2 year job and reasonably confident i will get another job when this one finishes (like you, better CV), thought when i will get the coveted ‘permanent’ job I have no idea.
There are still cases of people going straight from PhD to permanent job, but most will face at least a year of miserable uncertainty. It seems to me (based only on what i have seen, not statistics) there are less jobs, but more PhDs being done…depressing times indeed. I am sure that those who are great teachers and researchers will get jobs, but the uncertainty and necessity to move great distances to get even temporary jobs means a lot of very deserving people will be forced out…there needs to be far more post-PhD support and understanding, things may have been hard in the 80s but they are challenging in different ways now
Thanks Laura! And you make a couple of excellent pts I should have mentioned in the article:
1. Conferences – yes, this is SUCH a problem once you’ve finished your PhD but don’t have an academic job. I actually had to pull out of Leeds IMC in 2010 because I couldn’t afford the registration – as a PhD student York had helped with that, and now at Oxford my registration was covered by my employer, but in that year there was no way I could make ends meet to go. But you really do need to keep in the loop when you’re jobhunting, and so conferences are an important place to go! Some conferences do have bursaries, but they are normally for grad students, and since I wasn’t actually unemployed I didn’t qualify for the lower unemployed rate.
2. If you’re not able to keep your access to university email and online resources like JSTOR etc, both jobhunting and research become even more difficult.
Tricky times. Thanks for contributing.
I have a lot of sympathy with this, not least because of the fact that I was one of the lucky ones who got into a one year teaching job immediately post-PhD, and have not had to do the six month, five month, ten month contracts that I’ve seen a lot of my peers in the humanities go through. This may be partly disciplinary too – I’m a classicist, and the worst I’ve seen so far is a nine month contract, but that’s only of what gets advertised as opposed to what gets organised ad hoc behind the scenes because your old PhD department or a contact somehwere else is ‘doing you a favour’ by giving you a course or two.
Even with the luxury of a slightly more solid contract, I’m still only just getting to grips with the PhD-to-book manuscript – it took me 18 months to be able to look at the thing again after submission, and I think pretending that you don’t need to have a break to get your head straight is misleading and adds to this sense that somehow you’ve not done enough. Not to mention that if you’re in a teaching fellow position, even with a longer term contract, whether you get time to do research depends on how heavily you are laden with teaching.
I agree with you that after what I’ve experienced in terms of security, I’m not going to move to something that’s more precarious – but I know it’s a luxury that others don’t have. With that in mind, I plug the UCU’s Stamp Out Casual Contracts campaign – http://www.ucu.org.uk/index.cfm?articleid=3532 – which is trying to do something about this both nationally and in local branches.
Thank you, Liz! I had not heard of this campaign so this is a really useful comment. And you’re right: straight after the PhD you’re normally exhausted, and you need a break, physically and mentally, from your thesis!
“You have fleeting moments of feeling like a professional academic. But they don’t last, and every day brings you closer to your final pay cheque and another blank space on your CV.”
SO SO SO true! Unlike many people I know, I’ve had four years of this uncertainty. For a range of reasons, including family responsibilities (because I was the only one ‘unemployed’ and therefore could take it on), I have not accomplished all that I could. When I started my PhD in 2005, I rarely heard publications being spoken about. The crucial elements were:
1. You had to build up a teaching profile. I did. I’ve now been teaching, in and out of PhD, for 7 years!
2. Funding was what you had to attract. I did. The biggest scholarship open to foreign students and a very prestigious one in my own field, in addition to all the little conference grants.
I did publish too. That was considered an added extra back then! But then came the 2009 hiring freeze, months out of my PhD, and it’s a different world that I was never prepared for.
Four years out and having completed a teaching fellowship, I am back in no-man’s land. It’s all starting again — the bit part teaching (I’ve just had offered teaching withdrawn because of “contingency savings”), the endless job applications followed by the rejections or even worse, deafening soul-sucking silence, the steady flow of conferences I know I should attend but can’t afford to because it will mean not eating for a couple of weeks. I feel like I’m on a treadmill. Running to keep up but going nowhere.
After all the dreams and encouragement during the PhD, the world around me has changed. What makes it worse is that I am now told that a huge part of my not getting picked all these years is because I’m foreign. Word on the street is that since sponsorship regulations were tightened, Russell Group universities decided, across the board, to not even look at a non-EU applicant for an early career job unless all other applicants were “unemployable”. How many PhDs are unemployable?!! It staggers me that after all the efforts that were made by these universities to attract people like me (and our money), we may not be considered because of an accident of our place of birth. I look at the top academics in my field and the list of non-UE academics is mind-blowing! To think that if this was the case 10 years ago, British academia would not have had these people to enrich it is not even conceivable. And yet, that is a chance so many friends and I have not been given. I got lucky, I married into the UK. Whether I stay in academia or not, however, is to be seen.
It makes me so angry that we bring talent into this country – and indeed many unis specifically go out of their way to attract students from overseas – but then aren’t interested in hiring them! I know this is a UKBA problem rather than with the universities, but it is maddening, given academia is supposedly a global industry…
This is a problem, and I’ve seen it first-hand in the USA where universities purposefully recruit Asian students (for example), whose families they know will be able to afford full tuition (what’s ironic is that I’ve seen this practice carried out at a prominent American institution that is supposedly progressive-minded–what duplicity!). The rub here, too, is that these foreign students will not be eligible for scholarships or grants set up for domestic students As someone who studied in Canada and the UK, I was left out of many funding opportunities because of my American citizenship. In turn, my home country was not about to fund my studying abroad (outside of loans). Recruiting foreign students is a win-win for the academy and the local economy, and (without sounding too cliche) it’s just another part of the administrative machine. Some students who leave their home countries to pursue graduate work in the USA can find funding, but they will most likely leave with their share of debt too. Perhaps someone more experienced in this area can chime in, but I think this is a game that universities everywhere are in on.
In an environment that is supposedly pro-diversity, being “foreign” should be a strength, and I’m sorry that you experienced this. In a recent job application experience (for a part-time job in the USA), I was required to hire a 3rd-party company (at the tune of $260 US) to confirm and validate my UK degree! What rubbish!
I feel your pain! I am one of these ‘well-meaning older academics’ I am afraid. Except, that I would probably not encourage people in your situation to exhaust themselves. Instead, I would recommend all students have a solid ‘Plan B’ from the start of their PhD. When I was in your situation five years ago (reaching the end of postdoc, one young child, juggling teaching with research and constant applying for job), I developed one. Somehow, it kept me sane. Unfortunately, very few academics stress the importance of thinking of Plan B. I wish you well!
Thank you, Laurence! And yes, you are right. Supervisors should encourage their students to have contingency plans. My supervisors certainly cautioned me that I couldn’t be guaranteed an academic job. But I think it has to go further than this – that institutions should also prepare students more. And also that supervisors shouldn’t treat going into another industry as second-best, even if it feels like that to them and to their students, because I think it does dissuade students from seriously thinking about using their qualifications to move into different industries…
There’s an added issue here. In my years of searching for ‘alternative’ employment, I have found that employers don’t like PhDs. “You’re over-qualified”; “You wouldn’t fit in to the team, they’re all only graduates”; even “You are intellectual” are some of the feedback I’ve got from these job applications. I have done a range of jobs alongside my PhD but those don’t count for much. And I can’t leave the PhD off my application, as a lot of people suggest, because then I have a chasm the size of the Grand Canyon, not good for a job application.
Non-academic employers out there have no or very little conception of the range of transferable skills PhDs bring with them. And I think this is largely down to the fact that universities, the institutions that are supposed to train and support us, don’t make this known out there in the way that more vocational courses are highlighted for the skills they provide.
Apparently the financial industry — the hated one — is the only one that recognises these skills, I’ve heard. I shall let you know after my most recent application is rejected.
I can see that these would be the responses you get. That is why there is a need for a change in attitude throughout academia. Instead of ignoring the elephant in the room (namely that there are more PhD students than there are academic job), universities (and by that I mean academics at all levels and administrators) should develop strategies to make industry understand what skills PhDs have at the end of their studies. In the States, it is now common for administrators in academia to have a PhD. I know this is only one option to explore, but I think it is a good one. Someone with a PhD and good administrative skills (if that does exist) will really understand how a university should function. Anyway, universities have a duty of care towards their PhD students and it is time they took it a bit more seriously! I do wish you well, even though I know this is of very little consolation.
I agree! And thank you for the good wishes. Really, I don’t want to appear as if I feel desperate at the moment – I really enjoy my current work and I am in a better position than many of my friends. But we all do have reason to worry. I have several friends who’ve ended up leaving academia because of the job market, and it’s always a very hard decision to make!
I was lucky – I finished my doctorate in 2008 and soon after was able to land an attractive two-year job (albeit at the end of a year of frantically applying for everything), before getting a permanent job in 2010. But I know lots of others who have been less fortunate.
I’m not sure I can offer any helpful advice, rather than just sympathy, but I do have one comment on something you say above: “Some conferences do have bursaries, but they are normally for grad students, and since I wasn’t actually unemployed I didn’t qualify for the lower unemployed rate.”
I think it’s always worth checking with the organisers whether you qualify for any bursaries or, at least, reduced registration rates. In my, admittedly not extensive, experience, such discounts often extend to the unemployed and maybe even unDERemployed too. It may be that, even if you have work, you can get a discount so long as your employer isn’t paying for you to attend, and there’s rarely any harm in asking.
Thanks Ben! And yep, it’s definitely always worth checking with conference organisers, and in the past I had some help in that regard. Unfortunately of course many conferences are also very strapped for cash, and they need to save any little bits left for graduate bursaries (which I totally approve of!). The no man’s land is a difficult place to be.
Fingers crossed that I will have similar job seeking experience to you! 🙂
I tend to see academia primarily as a top-heavy business model. Some will disagree with that outlook, but, to me, it’s pretty clear that what we have seen and what we will continue to see is more administration expansion, more increases in tuition, and more over-reliance on part-time faculty (in the USA, 60-80% of university faculty (on average) are part time). In addition, it’s a matter of supply and demand (so many PhDs, so few positions). By producing more PhDs than jobs for PhDs, the academy is essentially farming its own future slave labor to which it has become exponentially addicted (possibly for good).
As someone who spent several years in corporate America before pursuing grad studies (I went into corporate after undergrad because I was spooked by talk of a bleak academic job market), I guess I did things backwards and I’m probably a poor example of an (ex-)up-and-coming academic. However, as someone who has also spent the last few years teaching part time (and by part time, I mean 8-10 courses per term at 5 different colleges), I feel that if one wants to stick with academia, then it’s a matter of adapting to a brave new world. The future of the profession (or at least the more realistic option for most newcomers) truly is a portfolio of part-time teaching assignments at several universities (i.e., the “heavy teaching loads” with the “pittance of a wage” that the article talks about) rather than a full-time position at one university for a decent wage. Most self-respecting individuals will leave for non-academic jobs (and rightly so). As for me, I can never go back to corporate. It’s left too deep a scar on my psyche to be able to return happily. I can’t help but feel for my younger colleagues who are either considering moving in that direction or who have already done so. For those who are true academics at heart, working at a non-academic job will prove a tough role to play (I know because I’ve been there and I pretended I was happy for years), and my practical piece of advice (for whatever it’s worth) is to try first to seek out and build a part-time teaching portfolio. It takes time, but it can be done (especially if you live in or near a major city). One additional area of promise and hope worth investigating is online teaching. There are more and more instructor opportunities in this area, and online education is something that is not going away anytime soon (if anything, it’s growing as more universities (especially American ones) are providing online learning options in order to reach a wider market). Approximately 1/3 of my portfolio includes online teaching. Teaching online helps to solve or leverage the geography problem, and (for me) it has been the only teaching that has come through in the summer. You can also do it in your pyjamas.
As for Ms. Menysnoweballes, I sincerely hope that you’ll be able to stay in full time. You’re a role model for us all (or at least you are one to me). -C
Thank you for commenting! I think that the situation in the UK is a little different, as to be honest, having LOADS of teaching experience rarely gives you an edge in the job market. I now have quite substantial teaching experience at several institutions and at several levels (undergrad, postgrad, access/lifelong learning). I hope this will help in my future job searches, and it may well do for short term posts, but permanent jobs really seem to be all about the publications. Teaching online certainly does seem like an interesting option, though, and one that is definitely growing! I do agree that young academics are going to have to be flexible in this market. But I do think there’s a difference between “showing flexibility” and “being exploited” – and finding that line can be difficult.
So many part-time/temporary teaching posts out from my PhD, I am accepting the inevitable and looking outside academia when my current temporary post ends in september, Except there I am constantly rejected due to not having the necessary experience (as I spent those years writing my thesis). I’ve been lucky in that I could take on these low-paid teaching posts due to living with my parents, which is a luxury not available to everyone. However, I am not getting any younger, and living at home in my mid-thirties, earning small amounts here and there, with no time to write articles (the amount of time teaching takes up…the marking, oh god, the marking…), no money to attend important conferences, is quite frankly depressing. However, I am probably going to have to stick out longer as the only way I will get the experience in the fields I would like to enter outside academia is through volunteering. Which again is a luxury that few can afford.
Thanks Katy. I’m sorry it’s come to this for you, when I know how hard you’ve worked and that you’re a good teacher and researcher! I wish you lots of luck with the next phase.
I’ll still keep my eye out for academic jobs, and my tutoring will keep me associated with academia and an institution, but the f/t jobs just aren’t there at the moment. Of course, I keep hearing about how it’ll be different after ‘the REF’, but that’s a rant for another time…
Speaking as another well-meaning aged academic, one thing I would add is that the ‘Plan B’ conversation really needs to start *before* the PhD, if only to manage expectations. One thing that makes me very uncomfortable about the present UK system is that postgraduates are basically an income stream, so all the incentives at departmental level are to persuade people to sign up regardless of long-term prospects; rather, we have to make the lack of opportunities in academia clear from the beginning – hell, the university as we know it may not *exist* in ten years’ time – even at the risk of dissuading applicants and undermining the department’s income figures… And the conversation has to continue through the whole degree, even when students complain that I’m undermining their confidence by being relentlessly negative.
I can’t believe, in retrospect, how easy I had it roughly twenty years ago – it didn’t feel like it at the time, mind you. Possibly I now have a clearer view, from the inside, of the nature or origins of some of the problems you face; the difficulty is that they appear as systematic, unintended consequences of changes that began decades ago, which makes it difficult to imagine solutions that don’t involve tearing the whole thing down and starting again. For example, when it comes to short-term teaching contracts I would say that, generally, it’s the system that is exploitative rather than any (or most, at any rate) of the individuals within it. The imperatives of REF create a need for established academics to be given research leave so that they can write their 4-star publications, but there is virtually never (for various reasons that generally are obscure to departments, let alone to individuals) enough money to replace them properly or fully; from the department’s perspective, the choice is then between offering (say) a six-month contract on the principle that it’s better than nothing for a struggling postdoc and at least gives them a bit more experience and some more time to get publications out, and getting the rest of the department to share out the teaching while a colleague is on leave, removing the opportunity for said struggling postdoc. I think we generally (without thinking about it very hard) assume that we’re actually doing you a favour, even if it’s not as big a favour as we’d like – and it’s not as if there’s a shortage of applicants for such positions that would suggest that there’s a serious problem.
The one advantage I think you do have compared with my situation then: this sort of on-line solidarity and the opportunity to share experiences and advice, whereas I was entirely on my own and stumbled into this career more or less by accident. Many thanks for this blog.
Thanks for your comment, Neville. And I certainly think it’s a systemic problem rather than to do with individuals – most academics I meet are at least sympathetic to junior academics, and many are outright supportive, but they too feel helpless in the face of an uncertain market. I also agree that “something is better than nothing” when it comes to jobs – at least when you have done just one or two temporary posts. But as you’ll see from the comments here, many of my peers move from short term post to short term post, and this is a real problem for maintaining a healthy family life, community roots etc. All tricky stuff! I appreciate you joining the conversation.
I finished my thesis in 2003 and have just got my first permanent job, as a CNRS researcher in France, so ten years there. In between, I was employed properly for 7 years out of those ten, one of which was English teaching, three a JRF. Otherwise I was teaching (medieval history) by the hour in UK universities, but really being supported by my partner. Only the last of these jobs, as an academic project manager on a European project for a French university, had any chance of running towards employment, I now see. Why? Because I was actually doing something useful for the institution I was working for. JRFs and such like are all very well, but you’re out of the system: better to be teaching on a longish contract, err, a bit like menysnoweballes. This has worked for many people I know. Neither a stella CV nor “knowing somebody” are sufficient. You need both to have everything (publications, teaching, national and international contacts) and to be inside the system, not outside it feeling worthy but rejected. Plus, you need a lot of luck, especially if you’re getting as far as interview.
Above all, my sympathy to everybody out there. I’m looking forward to not having to go through another crap spring sitting job interviews, knowing I’m not going to get it because it just doesn’t add up with that institution, hoping against hope I will, getting the phone call, and, hop, getting back up again.
I’m very glad you now have a permanent post, Chris – well-earned! I bet back in 2003 you didn’t think you’d end up having a permanent job in Paris! 🙂
Sorry that it took so long, but I only now discover how much you made of my humble blog post, together with all those heartfelt replies, too.
I was lucky in that I managed to get by without ever being unemployed out of my PhD, even though there were times when I earned so little that I slept in my office until the college could find me a room (one a student had dropped out). I was lucky that I was employed by an institution willing to do that, though!
But what happens now is so much worse, as UK universities simply abandon their responsibilities. At the same time, many departments are chronically understaffed, so much so that people fall ill because of stress.
The system is completely out of kilter.
Yes, we possibly produce more PhDs than there are academic posts, but we also are, at the moment, not allowed to/able to hire as many people as we’d need to do our jobs properly.
My hope is still that things will get better, but I wouldn’t hold my breath.
Sorry to be so downbeat, I wish I could be more encouraging. But I wish all of you all the best: do not forget: somebody with a humanities PhD has amazing transferrable skills, and there are careers out there which are interesting and fulfilling. There have been a few times in my career (also after getting that elusive permanent job!) where I gave some serious thoughts to a plan B, and I have always felt encouraged by it…. But then, it’s easy for me to talk, I understand that.
Good luck to you, and to everybody who told their story in the feedback thread.
Thank you very much for stopping by to comment so fully, and for your kind wishes! As I’ve said, compared to many of my friends I’ve been pretty fortunate in how my career has gone so far, but it’s such an uncertain industry… And you’re right that the problem of finding work for junior academics comes not from one discrete cause but many, which makes it really difficult to address. The future of higher education in general is a troubling thing…
Like others here I think the Plan B conversation needs to start before the beginning of the PHD, and that institutions should be as scrupulous and homest as possible in admitting and advising new PHDs.
I think the generational point is utterly, utterly wrong. My own generation was slaughtered by the 1980s recession to an even greater extent, than the present REF generation. I can count on the fingers of one hand those of my peers that won through eventually into academic jobs. And I know of others from even earlier 1950/early 60s who would say the same.
What matters, as well as recruitment of new lecturers, is investment in Universities, and in our case in the Humanities. Which means we all need to engage in the bigger arguments relating to the future of the humanities and foster a capacious imagination about their worth which I am sure you do. This will of course serve plan b as well as plan a and maybe even create a plan c.
Thanks for commenting, Sarah! And I appreciate your different perspective on this, since so far the feedback I have had has indicated that many academics who graduated a decade or two before me feel that the market is harder now than it once was. But in many ways it’s very hard to make judgements on this without some data on PhD nos, employment rate over time etc. I’m not sure how one would go about acquiring this info from past generations – I imagine it would be easier now. So in many ways we can only rely on group-memory, which, as we can see from the varying responses to this question of whether things are particularly bad now, is an unreliable beast at best.
In any case, I did not intend this to be a piece about how things are so much harder now than they were in the past, and I’m sorry if it came across that way. I do think that our current generation of young academics faces new challenges that older academics are not always aware of or best able to advise on, which is why universities have a duty of care in preparing PhD students for life post-graduation. And, like you, I would be very glad to see more investment in the humanities – even if I’m not very optimistic at present that we will see the necessary investments to protect the integrity of our field.
Re. Sarah’s point –
Having come from abroad for my PhD, I may have less access to tradition than others here, but while I have heard a lot about the carnage of the 1980s (still mitigated by the fact that ‘tenure’ actually meant tenure then!), there is little people say about the loss of PhD students who could not get a job. This is partly due to the fact that the people who would still talk about this as a group are those who *did* get jobs, of course, so I don’t doubt for a moment what Sarah is saying. In a situation where departments were closed and few academics in post could be sacked, things must have been dire for newcomers.
I would suggest, however, that those colleagues who did get and keep a job earlier on seem to have managed to get a relatively secure job a lot earlier than young academics do now, and people who dropped out of academia also did so earlier, without having prospects dangled in front of their noses forever. And crucially (this has been my main point all along!) universities were prepared to hire young academics with the kind of CV they themselves were willing to help students to acquire. Now we have long years of uncertainty under conditions which do not allow people to gain all the points which need to be on a CV in order to get invited for interview for a reasonably permanent(ish) job. That some manage to get there anyway is often either a question of parents’ willingness to support them into their 30s and/or juggling of various jobs to keep the rent paid while also publishing, which, in my experience of watching people who are going through this, requires nothing less than super-human efforts.
The least we could do as universities is to support our PhDs (collectively, not narrowly within the same university necessarily) to develop the skills, qualifications and publications we ourselves expect job applicants to have, and to allow them to do so within a context that’s actually bearable and realistic.
Now we have long years of uncertainty under conditions which do not allow people to gain all the points which need to be on a CV in order to get invited for interview for a reasonably permanent(ish) job.
Yes, this is the key difference, I think. I’ve spoken to many academics who said they were able to secure permanent jobs with limited teaching experience and few if any publishing credits. I know that very occasionally this still happens now, but it’s extremely unusual.
These are hard times in general and even previously ‘sure thing’ industries are not necessarily providing jobs. (My fiance is a lawyer; it took him a year post-qualification to find a permanent job.) But the academic job market does seem to be demanding more and more from candidates who are likely to be struggling more and more to meet those demands. A colleague recently told me: “A Russell Group university recently advertised a series of post-docs. Someone on the staff there told me that they wouldn’t consider anyone without a book.” A book, before beginning a post-doc? Ludicrous. Even 9-month teaching contracts demand high levels of research output, even though the role itself will offer no time for research…
And I thought I had seen it all…. a book as precondition for interview for a postdoc? Yikes.
But it illustrates the main point of our two blog posts perfectly, unfortunately.