Tips for (humanities?) grad students: IHE article

[Wahoo Redux]

Our criteria for tenure for our 4:4 faculty sticks at two peer-reviewed articles.  There is no expectation of scholarly activity for those of us with a 5:5 NTT term contract.

Where it is telltale is what comes in the door.  I know that my competitors for the 5:5 I teach all had completed doctorates, experience in the classroom, and multiple publications. 

One of our existing "clinical professors" lost hu's position when the department decided to hire a tenure line in hu's specialty----this person still teaches, but no longer has a "professor" title and has a much higher load.  Our existing clinical was completely blown out of the water by an objectively excellent candidate with a doctorate and multiple publications.  Hu just couldn't compete with the new breed of job candidate even though the faculty really like this person and hu had been with them almost a decade----it's pretty unfair in some regards.

I've heard it said, and it seems to be the case, that to get a job in the humanities today one has to have a CV that would have received tenure yesteryear. 

[Sun_Worshiper]

I'm in the social sciences, not humanities, but I think the advice in this article is pretty good for grad students in my area, particularly if they want a faculty job at a research university.  This point is especially important: "you ought to have three papers under review at all times. If a paper gets rejected, read the comments, revise it slightly if need be, then submit it elsewhere. If you always have three papers under review, you'll probably end up with an impressive CV, and then a job, and then tenure."

[Parasaurolophus]

I've heard it said, and it seems to be the case, that to get a job in the humanities today one has to have a CV that would have received tenure yesteryear.

That's basically true of people who gets jobs in my field, too. There are some exceptions for grads from and at the fanciest programs--Princeton, e.g., doesn't care, and will hire NYU grads with one or no pubs and see if they work out--but when I look at the new hire announcements, they're usually quite impressive. Hell, I myself have enough for tenure basically anywhere, and I'm only three years out and in a non-TT (but unionized and permanent) 4-4 with zero research expectations (in which I teach 4-4-2).

There's a good chance we'll be hiring for the winter. And although the job will almost certainly go to someone local, that someone will have a PhD and pubs. We have a few faculty with MAs on staff, but those days are basically gone. Unless, I guess, we're desperate and short on applicants at some point, which is rather unlikely. The local PhD-granting department produces lots of great grads, and tons more circulate through postdocs at the three local R1s.

[Caracal]

I've heard it said, and it seems to be the case, that to get a job in the humanities today one has to have a CV that would have received tenure yesteryear.

There's some truth to this.  I tend to think it is bad for scholarship. If you're supposed to be cranking out articles in grad school, it can discourage more creative and original research. It also keeps people in grad school longer. Even if an article is taken from a dissertation chapter, it always needs a lot of revision before it can be a stand alone article. Then you have to deal with the revision process. All of that takes time away from finishing the dissertation.