The core of the problem is, of course, the job market. The M.L.A. report estimates that only sixty per cent of newly-minted Ph.D.s will find tenure-track jobs after graduation. If anything, that’s wildly optimistic: the M.L.A. got to that figure by comparing the number of tenure-track jobs on its job list (around six hundred) with the number of new graduates (about a thousand). But that leaves out the thousands of unemployed graduates from past years who are still job-hunting—not to mention the older professors who didn’t receive tenure, and who now find themselves competing with their former students. (The report name-checks these groups, but, strangely, makes no effort to incorporate them into its overall estimate.) In all likelihood, the number of jobs per candidate is much smaller than the report suggests. That’s why the mood is so dire—why even professors are starting to ask, in the committee’s words, “Why maintain doctoral study in the modern languages and literatures—or the rest of the humanities—at all?”

Different people will tell you different stories about where all the jobs went. Some critics think that the humanities have gotten too weird—that undergrads, turned off by an overly theoretical approach, don’t want to participate anymore, and that teaching opportunities have disappeared as a result. (For its part, the M.L.A. committee cites “anti-intellectualism, anti-aesthetic hostility to literature, antipathy to theory, [and] nativist animosity to the study of languages other than English” as playing a role in the crisis; I’m inclined to fault the bad economy for declining enrollments.) Others point to the corporatization of universities, which are increasingly inclined to hire part-time, “adjunct” professors, rather than full-time, tenure-track ones, to teach undergrads. Adjuncts are cheaper; perhaps more importantly, they are easier to hire. Whereas it takes a committee of experts months to decide if someone’s scholarship is good, it takes an administrator only a few minutes to decide if that person can teach. That makes it easy for faculty size to track student demand. Today, more than half of all the academic jobs at American universities are part-time, non-research positions...Continue Reading

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