For the Harvard Ph.D., No More Guarantees

A few months ago things were looking pretty grim for Walter Hesford, a graduate student in American literature who'd just finished up a 516-page thesis on Thoreau. Hesford had started looking for a teaching job almost two years before, but so far almost 100 letters to schools as far away as Nigeria had managed to turn up only a thick stack of rejections. The months dragged on, and Hesford conscientiously saved his rejection letters, took to drinking paper cupfuls of Mogen David wine during undergraduate tutorials and waited for Commencement. Then came a break--an offer from Birzelt College in Israeli-occupied Jordan to teach English to Palestinian refugees.

It could have been worse, Hesford says. "Actually, you'd be surprised. They had a very fully developed English department--courses like 'Victorian Prose Writers.' And it's not as dangerous as it might sound... But it's viewed with suspicion by the Israeli government as sort of a hotbed of Palestinian revolutionary thought." Hesford decided against Birzeit, he says, because he asked himself, "If you're over there, how do you get back?' Unless of course you want to spend your life in exile." He pauses, then adds, "But if nothing else came through..."

Hesford was lucky. A day after he declined the Birzeit offer, he got a call from Union College in Schenectady, offering him a oneyear position there. He accepted the job with relief although it means he'll probably have to begin the same frustrating search all over again next year. Nowadays, however, not all cases like Hesford's have even such a temporarily happy ending. Declining enrollments, a generally sluggish economy and shrinking university budgets are making it more and more difficult for graduate students--even Harvard graduate students--to find the kind of academic positions that were relatively plentiful five or ten years ago.

"The day when Harvard graduate students could automatically count on getting jobs at the top-prestige universities are over," says Theda Skocpol, assistant professor of Sociology and director of placement for the department. "But," she adds, "there still are university jobs and good college jobs available to just about everybody."

If such jobs exist, they're certainly getting a lot harder to find, especially in the humanities, which have been hit hardest by the tight academic market. Hesford's case is far from unusual; many graduate students now spend several years applying unsuccessfully for jobs while they try to complete their dissertations. Take, for example, the case of Thomas Kaiser, a history graduate student who has applied in the last two years to 60 places-- "everywhere from major universities like Yale and Berkeley down to some rather small schools." What's discouraging, Kaiser says, is that "the prospects have become so poor for so many people who are so very good."

Few are more concerned about the situation than Peter S. McKinney, administrative dean of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, althought he insists that the outlook isn't quite as bleak as some (unemployed) students may think. "Some people will argue," he says, "that there's always a job for a Harvard Ph.D. There's some truth to the fact that in the national competition in most fields, Harvard ranks very high, but it's unrealistic if we think we're going to be able to place all our students in the kind of jobs we thought in the past were appropriate for a Harvard Ph.D."

Although the degree of optimism varies from department to department, most department chairmen and placement directors term the situation gloomy but not hopeless. "Our graduates seem to be continuing to get positions," says Paul C. Martin, former chairman of the Physics Department, one of the most affected among the sciences. "But typically the choices of academic positions available include some that are less desirable than corresponding students would have ended up with in Sputnik times." And although statistics compiled by Donna G. Martyn, director of placement for the GSAS, indicate that as of November 1974 over a quarter of the previous year's English Ph.D.'s remained unemployed, Jerome Buckley, professor of English and director of placement for the department, maintains, "Most people in English who've actually completed their theses do have jobs, though sometimes not always the jobs they wanted."

To be sure, the crunch isn't as bad for some people as for others. Around Harvard, at least, the feeling is very strong that women aren't having quite as hard a time of it. "A very good, top-notch woman has got a better chance at this point than a top-notch man," McKinney says. "Though in the soft fields, it's hard for everyone." It is "now almost the rule, not the exception," Brendan Maher, chairman of the Psychology and Social Relations Department, says, for letters from universities advertising openings to specify interest in finding qualified women or minority candidates. As a direct result of the women's movement and "the fuss that's been made," Skocpol says, "it's now easier for a woman to be taken seriously and harder for men to be placed through the old boy network."

If some groups are better off, so are some departments; in fact, at least one has found the poor economic situation a definite boon. "Economics is a super field right now," says Karl Case, a last year economics graduate student. "Enrollments are up; everyone is taking economics courses because the economy is so bad. It's gone from 360 to 560 concentrators at Harvard alone." In economics, too, the now favorable academic job market is complemented by the availability of good opportunities for economics Ph.D.'s in government and industry--a situation that traditionally has not existed in the humanities.

In face of the pressing scarcity of academic employment right now, however, that's one tradition that may be changing. While in the past, roughly 90 per cent of humanities Ph.D.'s were absorbed by the academic market, McKinney and Martyn now see one of their principal tasks as "expanding our students' view of what an acceptable job is to include...a considerable variety of non-academic opportunities." Martyn says she plans to work closely with Ernest R. May, professor of History, who, with three other educators, has already undertaken a study, under the auspices of the Higher Education Research Institute and the Mellon Foundation, of long-term prospects of academic employment and possible alternative careers for humanities Ph.D.'s.

May says his interest in the employment situation stems from "the increasing difficulty of placing students of mine in the kind of college or university they'd gone to earlier." and from his involvement in a similar pilot study in New York state. In the course of the pilot study, May found that history Ph.D.'s, because of their strong liberal arts training, were especially in demand for jobs in government and banking. At least two history Ph.D.'s, one of them directly on May's advice, have since successfully sought positions in New York City banks.

The notion of an alternative career also appeals to another unemployed history graduate student, John Baxter (not his real name). Unlike some of his more optimistic peers, Baxter believes the academic job market is drying up for good; after a year of rejection letters, he's getting out. "I've been disaffected with Harvard for several years," he says. "This year forced me to admit I wasn't getting anything out of it. I was disaffected with Cambridge too; Cambridge is a nutshell, too protective...I got a tentative offer, pending federal funding, to do social science research--and I started thinking in whole different terms. I'd been afraid to leave Cambridge, I'd been frantically looking for ways to stay here. The job offer turned my head, made me realize there's a world that isn't Cambridge, that isn't tight-assed intellectual...I thought, 'Have I been deluding myself?'"

That particular job offer didn't pan out, but Baxter plans to leave Harvard anyway this fall. "I'm gonna go where I'm going," he says, "and I'll be looking for a range of things from government to industry. There are potentials I haven't even explored because I've been at Harvard." Unlike many others, Baxter's story, at least to date, ends on an upbeat note. "In a way, I appreciate the way things worked out," he says. "I'm fortunate the job market has been so tight--it forced me to ask some question I wouldn't have asked otherwise."

For every Baxter, however, there is someone like sociologist Quee-Young Kim, who despite the frustrations of the job market is firmly committed to making it in the academic world. Both Kim and placement director Skocpol lay much of the blame for Kim's initial problems in finding a job on his being a foreigner. Although Kim was one of the department's top-recommended students, Skocpol says, when the job market begins to tighten, Americans tend to hire Americans." Kim finally landed a last-minute appointment at Simmons, but he is, like Hesford, a victim of what McKinney calls the "the revolving door" syndrome. In a year, he will be on the market again, trying to gain a foothold on the academic ladder to tenure. Nevertheless, Kim has no desire to switch careers. "At this point, I've invested so much time and energy in my field, I don't think I would change," he says. "I don't have high materialistic ambitions--just so long as my wife and I are surviving and I can make some kind of intellectual contribution."

Baxter and Kim share with Hesford a certain bitterness about the system--bitterness which emerges in serious personal questioning, in hurt pride, in a sense of the uselessness of daily routine. "When you're jobless," Hesford says, "the rigamarole you have to go through for your thesis after it's finished and the whole Commencement thing seem a little sour. You start thinking, 'What's the diploma worth?'"

Student resentment often focuses on Harvard professors, who many believe are not doing as much as they could for their students. One graduate student comments, "In times gone by, people did come by and knock on your door...Those days are gone, and I don't think some of the professors have adjusted to it. They don't want to go and beat bushes for their students."

McKinney is quick to agree. "Some faculty don't take enough interest, because it hasn't been particularly necessary in the past," he says. "It's a problem of making the faculty aware that things just aren't the same...They think you're crying wolf. They think a Harvard degree makes the statistics non-applicable." McKinney plans to spend part of the nest few months reminding the faculty of its responsibility in placing students.

McKinney says an important ameliorative measure was the GSAS's decision, six or seven years ago, to cut enrollment. The entering class has since been sliced in half and overall enrollment is down from about 3000 to 2100. While the cuts were intially inspired by the fear that the GSAS had grown too large, McKinney says, the move was certainly welltimed, given the difficulties of placement, as well as the University's present financial headaches.

Admittedly, Harvard cuts in enrollment are hardly likely to affect the overall job picture, especially as long as other colleges maintain large graduate programs. Buckley, who says Harvard has trimmed its first-year class in English from 100 to 17 in the past ten years, tells a story about a conversation he had recently with a certain state college official. This particular college, it seems, had just cut enrollment in its enormously bloated English Ph.D. program to 300 students. "That's really downright immoral," Buckley told the official. "What, cutting back?" the official asked. "No," said Buckley, "admitting one-tenth that many."

In spite of efforts by the GSAS, most officials and students at the Graduate School continue to believe that prospects for the academic market are dim, with no substantial improvement in sight. "It's possible that the intellectual and economic climate of the country is so bad at this time that no matter what we do, a large number of Ph.D.'s won't get jobs," McKinney says matter-of-factly. "But so far, at least, having a Ph.D. is still better than not having a high school diploma."