Shadows in the Field

A letter to the folks over at amusicology.

Thanks for this post about a very important topic. You’ve managed to remain a lot more sanguine about this whole thing than I’ve generally been able to. So, if you’re not “lamenting anything particular about this state of affairs,” then I would be happy to!

What you’re talking about, generally speaking, is the “casualization” of academic labor, the fact that more and more teaching is being done not by TT faculty with benefits and job security but by grad students, recent Ph.D. graduates, and others, for very little money/benefits/job/security/university support, etc. As a grad student who has taught my own high enrollment classes over the last few years (and who will likely be trying to cobble together adjunct work in the future), I would say that there is, indeed, something lamentable about this. The problem isn’t that as grad students or non-TT faculty that we are better or worse teachers than TT faculty, but that we aren’t really treated like real employees by our university (and compensated and supported accordingly).

I think you’re absolutely right when you say that we need to manage expectations when we get to grad school and not think that we’re going to get TT jobs at research universities as soon as we graduate. I hope that things like the musicology jobs wiki (which you guys have been great about drawing attention to) lead to a more honest discussion among prospective grad students, current grad students, and current faculty about the state of the job market. I would love to see aggregated statistics about how many people are entering musicology/ethno/theory/comp Ph.D. programs every year, what percentage graduate with degrees, and what percentage land TT jobs within 1 year, 5 years, or 10 years. My sense is that there are just far more people graduating every year than the number of TT jobs available. At a recent SEM, Philip Bohlman talked in his presidential speech about how great it was that there were more student members at the conference than faculty. For him, this was a cause for celebration, evidence that ethnomusicology was growing and assured of a bright future with so many young scholars interested in the field. But looked at another way, it means that (at least for that one weekend in Columbus, but possibly generally as well) there are more people in the field who will want jobs in a few years (when they presumably graduate) than currently have jobs. So unless every faculty member retires or the number of faculty lines in ethno increases dramatically, there’s going to be some serious un(der)employment.

I generally agree with most of your suggestions for how to manage this “shadow residency” period that will no doubt result from this serious un(der)employment, except for “ABDs should have the opportunity to teach independently.” Teaching experience in grad school will certainly make teaching as an adjunct in the future easier. (It will probably also make one more marketable on the job market generally speaking, as well. At least, I hope so.) But I also think that the increasing number of grad student teachers is part of the very problem we’re addressing, and that we should advocate for fewer courses to be taught by non-TT faculty, so that universities will have to hire more TT faculty to teach classes.

I also think that if we as grad students need to do a better job managing expectations, our departments need to do a better job managing outcomes. This situation where there are far more students with degrees than TT jobs is a situation that our departments have, in some sense, created (or allowed administrations to create for them, depending on to whom you would like to ascribe agency). Are there fields other than the academy that allow so many people to go through their rigourous professional training programs when the prospects for stable employment are so bleak? Our departments need to advocate for more faculty lines to be created and, frankly, to limit the flow of new students entering the Ph.D. pipeline. And as students, we need to do a better job of advocating for ourselves and not simply accept the fact that many of us will, despite having credentials, be only marginally employed for years at a time. That could include many things, including supporting unionization efforts, advocating within our own institutions and administrative structures for more TT jobs, or encouraging undergraduates to attend only institutions where the teaching is done by trained professionals, who are compensated like trained professionals. Whichever path we want to take, though, I think we need to find some way to get the supply of scholars more in line with the demand, unless we all want to be living in a “shadow residency” for the rest of our professional lives.