What to Do About Historians’ Job Crisis

With barbed tongues and references to the Occupy Wall Street movement, worried historians debated what to do about the jobs crisis in their field at the American Historical Association’s conference in Chicago this past weekend.

A panel discussion titled “Jobs for Historians: Approaching the Crisis from the Demand Side” grew out of a strongly-worded online exchange between Anthony Grafton and Jim Grossman, the president and executive director of the AHA, respectively, and Jesse Lemisch, a professor emeritus at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, City University of New York. An October article by Grafton and Grossman, “No More Plan B,” challenged the profession to abandon the idea that tenure-track professorships are the only real measure of success for doctoral students. History PhD graduates have greatly outnumbered tenure-track openings for decades, sometimes by as much as two to one. “Our only choice,” they say, “…is to train fewer historians or to find a more diverse array of employment opportunities.”