Heard in High Places
On March 23, 2004, a young historian announced that she would take down her blog, Invisible Adjunct."Gentle Readers," she explained,A few months ago, I made a vow to myself that this would be my last semester as an invisible adjunct. Since I've failed to secure a full-time position in my final attempt at the academic job market, what this means, of course, is that I made a vow to leave the academy. Six more weeks of teaching, and I head for the nearest exit.Many readers greeted this decision with dismay. Invisible Adjunct had won a wide readership with entries couched in precise and elegant prose, discussions conducted with a high degree of civility, a sense of humor that no experience, however depressing, could quite extinguish—and a sharp eye for the foibles and vanities of established historians.
In her mirror, I felt, I saw myself and other senior scholars from a new angle—and one I didn't like very much. For Invisible Adjunct devoted much of her space to arguing that senior historians have played an academic con game with their best students. They—we—portray history to vulnerable undergraduates as an intense, engrossing discipline. They—we—encourage particularly bright and engaged students to study for doctorates. Then they—we—fail, as we knew we would, to find tenure-track jobs for most of them, leaving them to scramble for adjunct positions in which they became, as she explained, largely invisible to colleagues and staff, even when students depended on them. The doctoral degree in history, as Invisible Adjunct and some of her favorite fellow bloggers, like Erin O'Connor and Timothy Burke, portrayed it, seems less a form of higher education than an attractive nuisance, an intellectual Greenland.
The substance of Grafton's article is a call for graduate programs in history to offer prospective students specific data about the progress of their doctoral students toward the degree and the job placement of their young historians. Then, he reviews the websites of over three dozen graduate programs in history, with an eye to the degree to which they forewarn prospective students about what has happened with recent graduate students in their departments. It's good to know that Invisible Adjunct's voice is heard in high offices at the AHA.
There are now about 167 doctoral programs in history in the United States. If history were a more disciplined field of study ..., if there weren't reasons, apart from vocational choice, for studying it ..., if there weren't opportunities outside of teaching at collegiate levels and teaching altogether ..., there's a good case to be made that the United States ought not have more than 50 doctoral programs in history and another 100 or so master's degree programs. But none of those provisos prevail. Given all of that, it's imperative that graduate programs in history be fully candid with prospective students and that those students be well informed. Let the buyer beware.