Thread by @BretDevereaux

So I talk a lot about the problems in both the graduate school experience and the academic job market, I thought it would be worthwhile to shout out how my own PhD department, @UNChistory is taking what I view as the right steps to respond as a department.

(Obligatory note that I also have a temporary adjunct gig in the department, but did not have any say in these changes).

What @UNChistory is doing - I can't give any exact numbers for obvious reasons - but they're cutting back grad. admissions and using that to raise stipends.

That's tough for a lot of departments to do, because big graduate programs are a component of dept. prestige. Universities often don't like it for the same reasons.

But it's the right thing to do. While departments can't solve the jobs crisis, this is the one thing they can do.

It gets at the twin problems: on the one hand that graduate stipends are so low that graduate students face a poverty-like condition which has all sorts of negative impacts (described here: acoup.blog/2021/10/01/col…)

At the same time, the number of jobs in most fields in the humanities have utterly cratered, leaving programs which were well balanced for the job market of 2007 producing far, far too many PhDs for the job market of literally any year since then.

That produces a job market that is almost totally random, a hiring environment for many adjuncts that is also very bad and also just a lot of shattered broken dreams for people who committed almost a decade to a field.

So cutting back the size of incoming grad classes and using the extra money to raise stipends (albeit only modestly) is really the only responsible course for departments.

And I'm glad to see that @UNChistory is giving it a try and I'd love to hear other programs doing the same.

Ideally, looking at the AHA's jobs data, what we'd need is for the entire field to cut graduate admissions by about half to bring new PhDs in line with jobs and give a little slack to allow the 2008-present glut to be absorbed: historians.org/ahajobsreport2…

This is a topic where I think pressure and guidance from the professional associations in various fields - e.g. @AHAhistorians @scsclassics @archaeology_aia - would serve a valuable role in getting entire fields to move together, given the collective action problem.

Of course that would require those professional associations to actually grapple with the scale of the problem, something that, from both attending and hearing about their annual meetings, they mostly seem as yet unwilling to do.

So at this stage it falls to individual departments to be the first movers in this and its good to see at least one (and I hope more?) moving in this direction.

(I should note, I suppose, both that again, I'm currently teaching for @UNChistory , which is why I knew about this, and also that I checked with the department before, you know, tweeting out their policy changes.)

Also, if you want to study Roman history at UNC like I did...well, you can't. They currently have no permanent Roman historian. But they are trying to raise money to hire one (won't be me, no self-dealing here), so if you have a spare few million dollars...history.unc.edu/the-richard-ta…