Anomaly at Harvard?

In the most competitive year for humanities graduate students entering the field of academia since the Modern Language Association began tracking academic job trends 35 years ago, some administrators maintain that students in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences are an anomaly to the grim national picture.

On the national scale, the number of available positions in the field of English, for instance, has dropped 35 percent from last year. Similarly, those in foreign languages have dropped 39 percent, according to the MLA.

The American Historical Association and Economic Association have both reported substantial drops in their respective disciplines, with the number of available history jobs the lowest in a decade.

“For this year, yes, there are many, many fewer jobs,” says W. James Simpson, the English Department’s director of graduate studies. “But our students got them.”

Of the 10 English students Simpson says were “seriously” on the job market, seven received tenure-track positions at “really prestigious institutions,” and one received a fellowship at the Harvard Humanities Center. But two individuals were unsuccessful in their job searches.

History Department Chair Lizabeth Cohen says that graduate students in her department, too, did “incredibly well” this year, despite the tough job market. Many students were able to procure tenure-track jobs, postdoctoral fellowships, and short-term visiting lectureships, according to Cohen.

Simpson speculates that the success of so many English graduate students this year was likely due to the department’s structure as a “vocational program” that produces not only “technically competent scholars” but also employable candidates with desirable characteristics.

PRODUCING DESIRABLE CANDIDATES

In a bleak fiscal climate, various graduate humanities programs at Harvard provide students career-counseling services while they also bolster their students’ academic interests.

Simpson says that the English department’s job placement seminar—which affords students the chance to participate in mock interviews—“maximizes” the possibility of them finding a job.

And although 10 history Ph.D. students were offered tenure-track positions at various universities, Cohen says that the history department has used what “limited budget we got from University Hall” to hire its own students, “to help them survive in these difficult times.”

Cohen also credited the University’s new College Fellow Program—instituted this past year—with providing several students with a means of support for the coming year.

The program, which recruited 21 Ph.D.s for a one-year teaching and research fellowship, was initially conceived as a cost-cutting mechanism. Since the hiring slowdown limited the number of new lecturers FAS could hire last year, the new program provided a much cheaper alternative.

Some administrators, however, consider the College Fellow Program to be more than a mere economic solution to the hiring slowdown. For some, the initiative also provides former graduate students the rare opportunity to spend a year developing their teaching skills, thereby making them more competitive in the job market.

“I love solutions that solve multiple problems at the same time,” says FAS Dean Michael D. Smith.

“We’re continuing to graduate outstanding Ph.D. students who would love to go on to an academic career, but the market is not very strong for them,” he says. “Should we just have them flipping burgers or should we have them here helping out on campus where we have actual needs?”

Eight of this year’s 21 fellows have received tenure-track positions at other universities, according to FAS Dean for Faculty Affairs and Planning Nina Zipser, who oversees the program. Seven others have been reappointed for the 2010-2011 academic year.

Nathanael Andrade—who specializes in ancient history—is one of the eight current college fellows who received a tenure-track position for next year. Andrade, who will work at West Virginia University in the fall, says that his time as a fellow this past year made him “a more marketable candidate from the perspective of search committees,” as he was able to design his own syllabi and teach his own courses—two experiences many graduate students never have before applying for jobs.

Tomoko L. Kitagawa, a college fellow in the field of East Asian Languages and Civilizations, adds that the experience of having created the two courses she taught this year puts her a step ahead of the other graduate students with whom she will eventually compete for tenure-track positions.

“It’s like departing from the graduate school mentality where everything is given,” she says. “Now I’m contributing something.”

But Kitagawa also notes that while being a college fellow was a “good experience,” the program was “just established a year ago, so not too many institutions recognize what I did.”

AN ANOMALY?

But not every graduate student is convinced that this year’s reported success exempts Harvard students from a national trend.

“Last year was pretty bad, from what I know,” says Steven P. Rozenski, a graduate student interested in medieval religious literature. “I’m glad I have a couple of years to go, though.”

According to William Pannapacker, a Harvard English graduate student in the 1990s and a contributor to The Chronicle of Higher Education, one year of success is not enough evidence to ignore the gravity of the “academic labor market.”

In fact, the full effect of the economic crisis on academia has yet to be seen: it could either rebound or the decline in traditional academic jobs may continue and never recover, he says.

He adds that he hopes his alma mater will prepare its graduate students for the opportunities that will exist in the future rather than continuing to fixate on “familiar positions” that will probably decline than in the coming decades.

“It seems clear that the old system in which the tenure-track position was the standard expectation will have to be replaced by a range of other options,” he says. “Even Harvard will have to face that reality.”

—Staff writer James K. McAuley can be reached at mcauley@fas.harvard.edu.