My point is not that “I want a Plan A, not a Plan B,” but rather that the whole narrative of finding Plan Bs doesn’t take into account the fact that the culture of history grad programs rewards those for whom anything other than a Plan A career is a failure. I’m saying that we can’t promote Plan Bs to students while at the same time continue to treat those who might enter a grad program actually wanting a Plan B career as “less serious.”

By the same token, grad programs need to understand that, as the admission requirements continue to become more stringent and expectations for work produced prior to the PhD, the situation as it stands is wasting most of the field’s future talent. People become tired, disenchanted, and angry and leave the field, and no one acknowledges that if born a generation ago the same people may have gone on to be leaders in the field.

The problem with Plan B is that we have all stuck our heads in the sand–students, professors, and administrators alike. PhD programs continue to produce too many PhDs, who, despite the acerbic comments to the contrary, are probably better prepared to do historical work than in the past, when there were far fewer time-to-degree limitations and much less of an expectation to publish (or even instruct). Yet, as you say, almost none of these people will ever secure an actual, rather than just a passing, career in academia. You focus on “opportunity costs,” I would say that these are “existential costs” whether viewed from the perspective of the student (who goes away with a PhD but no academic career, feeling like a hopeless reject) or the field (which, mostly blithely, soldiers on with abject “tighten the belt” comments, sighs of mild consternation, or, worst of all, useless “back in my day” comments as to the quality of the current crop of PhDs).

The market is what it is, as you say, but almost no one is doing anything about it except complaining in vague political terms about anomie in the state of American intellect. Of course, the academy needs to cut down the numbers of PhDs it produces. More than this, people who have permanent positions and only hold an MA (or maintain a decades-long ABD status) should probably be let go, no matter how “good” they are. Late-career professors should probably be pushed out to make room for more professors to be hired with lower pay. The emphasis on a strong dissertation will probably have to be lessened by an even quicker time-to-degree expectation, a la the British system. We probably should also start weeding out students who don’t take part in all aspects of the career from an early point, i.e. as researchers, teachers, extra-program colleagues, program builders, and liasons with university administration. There are no more places for dreamy intellectuals, just academic professionals.

The fact of the matter is that we can’t have it both ways. We can’t purport to uphold a legacy of wood-paneled, be-tweeded pipe smokery–or, like my mother (also an academic) part-time, blue-collared activism–while the industry has changed to such a degree so as to make such a view not only antiquated but pathetically blind to the challenges of actual students going out into the world with PhDs in hand. At no point in the history of the American academy has there ever been this level of a jobs crisis; for people to make comparisons with past events is to mince words.

Sadly, what this means is that to slim down the PhD establishment we are going to have to take away the ability for a graduate career to serve as a maturation project–I know under the system I propose, I never would have made it. Take this column and even this response to your comment: perhaps under the new, leaner system we wouldn’t promote this kind of dialogue, but we’d adopt a culture of “keeping one’s head down” or, rather, those who made it as far as I have in a grad program would only be those who’d see such conversations as useless quibbling in light of the mechanics of getting things done. In solving the jobs crisis, we might see, therefore, the promotion of a type of academic whom most of us would have little connection with–an automaton who never made a mistake in the tiny calculations it will take to succeed in the brave new world.

So, my column is saying: what can we do to balance the old with the new? Is there anything that can be done to maintain the positive attributes of academia (which draw students there in the first place) while at the same time promoting a different, more efficacious form of graduate instruction/preparation? I don’t have the answer, but these are the kinds of things that keep me up at night.

Again, thanks for reading and keep in touch.

LRS

If I am reading your piece right, the “problem with Plan B” is that you don’t want a Plan B, you want Plan A. Is that about right?

No one is blaming you or other grad students for the state of the academic job market–and I sure hope that it did not seem as if I was. But the market is what it is, and I think it would be enormously irresponsible for people in my position to pretend otherwise. (It has been that way for decades, and whoever told you in 1996 that “that the imminent retirement of Baby Boomer professors would open up untold numbers of jobs” was a horse’s–make that a Professor Sparkle Pony.) The majority of current grad students in the humanities are not going to land tenure track jobs. Probably the vast majority. This is not a controversial point. Most of you are not going to be professors. You are going to develop Plan Bs.

As to the prairie dog metaphor–did your childhood include the wonderful Bill Peet classic Farewell to Shady Glade?