News and views about philosophy, the academic profession, academic freedom, intellectual culture, and other topics. The world’s most popular philosophy blog, since 2003.
My former colleagues at another university in Middle East have also been moved to online teaching indefinitely, with the students…
If much of the interest of high-quality papers lies between the lines—in the metaphorical fire that a paper lights in…
I would also recommend that potential grad students make inquiries into how far the compensation package actually goes towards cost…
It’s a mix. I’m still in the UAE with my family, and we feel safe. But some students and faculty…
In the above comment, Michel wrote: “As an aside, every once in a while I check out how the chatbots…
I could imagine LLMs having saved me a *ton* of time in graduate school–e.g., by having supplied reasonable answers to…
The McMaster Department of Philosophy has now put together the following notice commemorating Barry: Barry Allen: A Philosophical Life Barry…
Grim but essential reading; here's the key chart, "job listings in the humanities":
Note, of course, that many listed jobs, especially around 2008-2010, may not have been filled due to budgetary pressures. Philosophy listings are down 50% from their recent high a decade ago, and below where they were in 2002-03.
Grim indeed. I do have a couple questions/concerns about the article that I'd like to hear others' thoughts on.
First, this chart would be much more useful if it separated out adjunct teaching positions, but I think it doesn't. Clicking through to the original source of the chart, the key says that the chart represents faculty positions defined as an "employee of a two-year or four-year college or a university who teaches credit-earning courses and who may also perform research activities. Faculty thus include not only individuals who have faculty status in their institutions but also those who are classified as instructional staff by their employers." This explicitly includes instructors, but I'm not sure if it also counts part-time, temporary adjuncts. If so, the numbers of good jobs are far worse than this indicates.
Second, I'm wondering what people think about this graph juxtaposed with the graph in the article showing total jobs in the humanities growing year-on-year, at about the same rate as other areas (much slower than health sciences positions, significantly faster than engineering and education, and roughly on pace with the others). These two charts put together could mean that once people retire job markets will pick back up again, though I'm pessimistic. Still, it does nuance the chart on job listings.
Many thanks for your observations about the graphs. All points are well taken. Only a few of the societies offer the data broken out between full-time and adjunct faculty, but I will see if there is some way way of tabulating it from the underlying data.
Hard to draw any conclusion, certainly not "dire" ones, from this graph. As a commentator above notes, this graph is hard to square with that showing overall increases in humanities faculty. Perhaps the differences are due to an increase in the number of humanities disciplines, while the "dire" graph only show a small number of long-established areas. So communications, american studies, women's studies, cultural studies, political science, etc and so forth are missing, and they may very well be drawing hires away from those departments tracked in the graph. My department places philosophy phds in any number of humanities departments/units. We may well bemoan the loss of hires in "canonical" departments, but we should not conclude there is a crisis in hiring in general in the humanities from such limited and selective data.
—–
KEYWORDS:
Primary Blog
Leave a Reply