Institutional Prestige vs Program Prestige For Interdisciplinary Field?

[fourhats]

That frustration is now deafening anywhere that a fair number of humanities faculty gather and people who finished their graduate degrees recently are somehow now just finding out now that the job market is beyond terrible and even the adjunct positions are declining rapidly as institutions close, go to canned courses with remote adjuncts, or even consolidate courses to be huge (reports of sections that are literally more than a thousand students are appearing with more frequency in articles on higher ed in the US).

I am teaching a graduate seminar in the humanities now. Every one of the students in it is well aware of the job market prospects. They chose to go ahead anyway, and do think about alternative careers for when they finish. They'd love a professorial career, but know that the odds are against it. They love what they're doing but their eyes are wide open.

[polly_mer]

That frustration is now deafening anywhere that a fair number of humanities faculty gather and people who finished their graduate degrees recently are somehow now just finding out now that the job market is beyond terrible and even the adjunct positions are declining rapidly as institutions close, go to canned courses with remote adjuncts, or even consolidate courses to be huge (reports of sections that are literally more than a thousand students are appearing with more frequency in articles on higher ed in the US).

I am teaching a graduate seminar in the humanities now. Every one of the students in it is well aware of the job market prospects. They chose to go ahead anyway, and do think about alternative careers for when they finish. They'd love a professorial career, but know that the odds are against it. They love what they're doing but their eyes are wide open.

Does thinking about alternative careers translate into observable actions to prepare for those careers?

I ask because a common pattern is to recite the right words up to the point of being smacked in the face with the reality of being the person who isn't getting the faculty job and having to deal with the opportunity costs of spending grad school focused on the academics.

My favorite example continues to be the historian who was gung-ho on a PhD as a non-academic credential who then wrote https://chroniclevitae.com/news/2223-odds-are-your-doctorate-will-not-prepare-you-for-a-profession-outside-academe after finding out the reality.

[polly_mer]

But the future of Ethnic and American Studies is precarious and seeing as how there are like 5 Ethnic/AMST jobs per year, I don't know how this program is doing as well as it is. On the other hand is Harvard which has the name which will always last.

Harvard made the news this winter for denying tenure to Dr. García Peña in the Ethnic Studies program.  "Many students and scholars have questioned Harvard's overall commitment to ethnic studies. They've also pointed out that García Peña is now in the strange position of being on the hiring committee for a four-person ethnic studies faculty cluster as she prepares to leave campus."

The Harvard Crimson points out four decades of minimal support for Ethnic Studies at Harvard: https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2017/5/23/road-to-ethnic-studies/

When I look at the alumni placement webpage for the PhD program for Harvard's American studies and put it in a spreadsheet so I can sort, I see

* 3-6 PhDs awarded every year (big numbers if the total national TT jobs are averaging 5 every year)

* About 20 of the about 40 positions listed are non-academic or are contingent academic positions.

* Among the (probable based on title) TT faculty positions listed, most are related to history with a smattering of American studies, some are in English, and one probably non-TT position is in women's studies.  There are no ethnic studies positions listed.

When I go look at the student interests page, I see 34 names currently listed.  That could indicate a 6-7 year program with 5-7 students admitted each year with a little attrition or it could mean something else since no dates are listed.

None of this paints a rosy picture of going to Harvard, spending a few years in a joint American and Ethnic Studies program, and then getting a tenure track position somewhere in American and Ethnic Studies.

[Hibush]

But the future of Ethnic and American Studies is precarious and seeing as how there are like 5 Ethnic/AMST jobs per year, I don't know how this program is doing as well as it is. On the other hand is Harvard which has the name which will always last.

Harvard made the news this winter for denying tenure to Dr. García Peña in the Ethnic Studies program.  "Many students and scholars have questioned Harvard's overall commitment to ethnic studies. They've also pointed out that García Peña is now in the strange position of being on the hiring committee for a four-person ethnic studies faculty cluster as she prepares to leave campus."

None of this paints a rosy picture of going to Harvard, spending a few years in a joint American and Ethnic Studies program, and then getting a tenure track position somewhere in American and Ethnic Studies.

Some observers worried that Garcia Peña's tenure denial was really a rejection of the Ethnic Studies program by the Harvard establishment. Some said that Garcia Peña didn't measure up to Harvard scholarly expectations, while others said that she was one of the top scholars in the field. All of those things may be true. If so, the department is not a good bet.

This is a point in American culture where ethnic studies needs to contribute heavily to polity. Staying in the field is valuable to society. I'm not sure this avenue is the one that will be influential.

[gael2020]

But the future of Ethnic and American Studies is precarious and seeing as how there are like 5 Ethnic/AMST jobs per year, I don't know how this program is doing as well as it is. On the other hand is Harvard which has the name which will always last.

Harvard made the news this winter for denying tenure to Dr. García Peña in the Ethnic Studies program.  "Many students and scholars have questioned Harvard's overall commitment to ethnic studies. They've also pointed out that García Peña is now in the strange position of being on the hiring committee for a four-person ethnic studies faculty cluster as she prepares to leave campus."

None of this paints a rosy picture of going to Harvard, spending a few years in a joint American and Ethnic Studies program, and then getting a tenure track position somewhere in American and Ethnic Studies.

Some observers worried that Garcia Peña's tenure denial was really a rejection of the Ethnic Studies program by the Harvard establishment. Some said that Garcia Peña didn't measure up to Harvard scholarly expectations, while others said that she was one of the top scholars in the field. All of those things may be true. If so, the department is not a good bet.

This is a point in American culture where ethnic studies needs to contribute heavily to polity. Staying in the field is valuable to society. I'm not sure this avenue is the one that will be influential.

Since American Studies is such a small field - do reputations like these matter since its students seem to be applying outside of AMST? Would the name brand of Harvard supersede even a lousy department reputation?

I really don't have an insider knowledge of how Search Committees work so I'm genuinely curious. And department reputation is fascinating to me. It's not official and yet it seems to have such a powerful force such that even  the name Harvard or Yale or Princeton might not help one at all.

[jerseyjay]

On the question of program prestige:

I think to some degree it depends what school you applying for and who is on the search committee. If I (a historian) were put on the SC to hire, say an American Studies professor (which is not out the possibility at my school), I have no idea which program is the best.

For that matter, I am not entirely sure what history programs are the best. I mean, is Harvard better than Berkeley in history, in terms of prestige?

Then, of course, there is specialization. If I were on the SC for an Asian historian, I couldn't tell you what the most prestigious program is.

For me, prestige is really a mixture of people whose work I have read; dissertations I have heard about; people I have met at conferences; and general university prestige.

That being said, at my school, as I mentioned, somebody with a degree from a select range of prestigious schools would be looked favorably upon, if he or she also showed experience/aptitude/interest in the type of school we are and the type of students we have. But since we are not a research university, we probably wouldn't parse the difference between one prestigious school vs. another. We tend to get more hires from the prestigious schools within a 100-mile radius, but that's probably because people from those schools are more likely to apply.

[apl68]

But please don't do it because graduate school means "doing something you love." I love history. I love reading about history, I love researching history. I love teaching history. I love talking about history with my friends. I love visiting historical archives on my holidays.

That said, I hated graduate school. Until I got through all my coursework (or actually, transferred to a British university after studying for several years in the US) I hated graduate school. It was made up of skimming (not reading) endless monographs without the time or attention span to actually savor them; learning to talk about books I hadn't read; focusing more on what other people have said about history instead of learning about history itself. I am not arguing that this is not necessary for the professional formation of a historian. It is quite useful to me now. But it was not fun, much less "something I love".

Only once I started my dissertation was I able to actually focus on research, which is what I love. And only after I finished my dissertation was I able to take the time to sit down and enjoy reading a history book.

So my advice, for what it is worth, is if you love a subject, forget about graduate school that probably won't get you a job and probably won't be enjoyable, and instead get a job in some office job you can leave at the end of the day. And read books you find enjoyable on the train to work, and at home in the evening.

That of course is not the question that the OP asked, however.

Another former history PhD student here.  Jerseyjay's description rings true.  The work load is insane, it's very hard to make ends meet, and grad school tends to be socially isolating.  For me it was by and large a very unhappy time in life.  I persisted for six years because I felt like once I was well and truly immersed in it I felt like I had no choice but to follow through. 

Looking back, I'm glad that I learned what I did.  I still use much of it.  I also knew a couple of students in the same program who gave the impression that they were truly having a good time.  When all is said and done, though, I really don't think I'd do it over again if I had the chance, knowing what I do now.  I'd have a hard time recommending in good conscience that anybody try grad school.

IF you decide, despite all the efforts at warning here, to go ahead and try grad school, be prepared to let yourself bail out if you don't find yourself enjoying what you're doing.  Don't persist at grad school unless you really find you like the studies.

[apl68]

That frustration is now deafening anywhere that a fair number of humanities faculty gather and people who finished their graduate degrees recently are somehow now just finding out now that the job market is beyond terrible and even the adjunct positions are declining rapidly as institutions close, go to canned courses with remote adjuncts, or even consolidate courses to be huge (reports of sections that are literally more than a thousand students are appearing with more frequency in articles on higher ed in the US).

I am teaching a graduate seminar in the humanities now. Every one of the students in it is well aware of the job market prospects. They chose to go ahead anyway, and do think about alternative careers for when they finish. They'd love a professorial career, but know that the odds are against it. They love what they're doing but their eyes are wide open.

Does thinking about alternative careers translate into observable actions to prepare for those careers?

I ask because a common pattern is to recite the right words up to the point of being smacked in the face with the reality of being the person who isn't getting the faculty job and having to deal with the opportunity costs of spending grad school focused on the academics.

My favorite example continues to be the historian who was gung-ho on a PhD as a non-academic credential who then wrote https://chroniclevitae.com/news/2223-odds-are-your-doctorate-will-not-prepare-you-for-a-profession-outside-academe after finding out the reality.

That article polly links also rings true.  Earning a PhD and failing to find a secure place in academia afterward usually means, as it did in my case, having to write off all those years of work and start over on a new career almost from scratch.  In my case I was able to use a library assistant job at my grad institution as a basis for building a library career.  But that took years of dues-paying and online classes for a library degree to lead to a professional-level position. 

In fairness, the writer of the article above seems to have enjoyed her education, and to have no regrets about the time spent getting it before buckling down and starting on an alternate career.  For some people grad school seems to be its own reward.  Again, if you do start grad school and find it unrewarding, be prepared to drop out before investing multiple years of your life in it.

[polly_mer]

I really don't have an insider knowledge of how Search Committees work so I'm genuinely curious. And department reputation is fascinating to me. It's not official and yet it seems to have such a powerful force such that even  the name Harvard or Yale or Princeton might not help one at all.

Search committees are composed of human beings who have constructed their own shortcuts to make decisions because no one has time to research every single decision from scratch every time.  Ain't nobody got time for that, as some of my colleagues would say.

How those shortcuts work in practice is very SC dependent, even outside of academia.

When I've been a research-heavy places where nearly everyone on the SC will know most of the practitioners in the field, we tend to select for people we know or at least people who are close affiliates with people we know.  Thus, Harvard/Yale/Princeton is almost irrelevant because the list is much more:

* Steve whom we all know and would like day-to-day, but isn't exactly the right fit for the job ad we posted, but probably could make the shift
* Margo who was Jamil's postdoc and therefore does know process X
* Lamar who was Steve's postdoc back in the day and has been off establishing his own group
* June who is the biggest contrarian ever and thus would be unpleasant day-to-day, but is by far the most creative of the pool and most likely to figure out the big problem we're trying to solve.

At a certain level, the exact ranking of a department doesn't matter because we're doing everything based on our personal knowledge of the relatively small research community.  There's no way we're hiring an outsider because it's clear they aren't working in the relevant area doing relevant things.

That's very different than when I was at a tiny, rural college where we were evaluating strangers well outside our field (the SC was an engineer, a nurse, a religion professor, and an art professor to hire the most recent historian who would be the only historian employed at the time).  In that case, the question was mostly how much experience candidates had teaching at a place like ours and whether the focus in the narratives aligned well with the job we had. 

As jersey jay wrote, in that situation, coming from a highly ranked department in the field/specialty was not something anyone knew and therefore didn't care about.  Direct experience at an institution like ours was far more important.

In that situation, being from HYP is a huge negative because it's likely that a person who liked that atmosphere (urban, research focused) well enough to stay for years to get a PhD is not going to like our situation (so rural that going to Taco Bell counts as a big outing to an ethnic restaurant and mostly teaching gen ed to underprepared students who resent taking gen ed classes).  It's possible that someone who earned a HYP PhD several years ago and has been at an institution like ours will make a smooth transition and not leave in under a year, but that situation relies heavily on what the narrative states so that the HYP PhD is an afterthought.

For places in-between, I've seen it go both ways in terms of whether HYP (or equivalent in my fields) is a plus or a minus.  It depends very heavily on how the last few people in that situation performed and what the SCs personal ideas of how those folks will fit are. 

If we're hiring a researcher who teaches some who will be OK with the amenities in town, then HYP/equivalent has a chance. 

If we're hiring a teacher who does some research with the resources readily available, then we're going to be looking at someone who has that kind of experience over someone who is used to having real research support including enough time to really dig in.

For the record, most history academic jobs are at teaching-with-some-research or teaching-mostly institutions.  However, most TT/T history jobs are at R1s and similar elite institutions.  Thus, most of the history academic jobs aren't in close alignment with either HYP/top-ranked programs, but attending HYP/top-ranked programs is really the best shot at getting a TT/T history job that includes a significant fraction of research.

[Hibush]

* Steve whom we all know and would like day-to-day, but isn't exactly the right fit for the job ad we posted, but probably could make the shift
* Margo who was Jamil's postdoc and therefore does know process X
* Lamar who was Steve's postdoc back in the day and has been off establishing his own group
* June who is the biggest contrarian ever and thus would be unpleasant day-to-day, but is by far the most creative of the pool and most likely to figure out the big problem we're trying to solve.

[/quote]

This is a very nice description of a finalist list for R1 hiring. They will likely be ranked differently by each SC member depending on priorities. Likewise among the faculty in the department that endorses the SC recommendation. The chair and the dean that approve and hire will have yet different weightings.

(Our  department culture is strong enough, that I'd go for June and try to socialize her just a enough that the positive culture survives. Hiring her looks like the biggest win. The odds are less than even that I could talk my colleagues into it.)

[Ruralguy]

We would never ever hire anyone who is *obviously* unpleasant. Sorry, but it just won't work.

[Caracal]

Another former history PhD student here.  Jerseyjay's description rings true.  The work load is insane, it's very hard to make ends meet, and grad school tends to be socially isolating.  For me it was by and large a very unhappy time in life.

By and large I enjoyed my time in grad school. That's not to say it was all great, there was certainly a lot of stress and anxiety, but overall it was a pretty good time in my life. It can be hard to know what goes into that, however. I certainly knew people who seemed pretty miserable. Perhaps I was just lucky to be where I was at the same time as a group of other people who I became very good friends with. I sometimes do think that it helped a lot that I went to grad school in an affordable city though. We all lived in pretty decent apartments within walking distance of the school and each other. It made for a very nice environment.

[Hibush]

We would never ever hire anyone who is *obviously* unpleasant. Sorry, but it just won't work.

Everyone will indeed weigh all the parameters differently. Avoiding obvious unpleasantness is almost always the right choice,. I interpreted "contrarian" as likely to question the common wisdom and be less likely, or slower, to join a consensus. That doesn't have to be done unpleasantly.

[polly_mer]

We would never ever hire anyone who is *obviously* unpleasant. Sorry, but it just won't work.

Everyone will indeed weigh all the parameters differently. Avoiding obvious unpleasantness is almost always the right choice,. I interpreted "contrarian" as likely to question the common wisdom and be less likely, or slower, to join a consensus. That doesn't have to be done unpleasantly.

I really meant that we all know June, have interacted with June, and therefore have a pretty good idea on the jerk-to-genius ratio involved in working with her.

I currently have several coworkers in that category at my non-academic institution.  New managers often talk a good line about collegiality and sometimes get the Junes reassigned to other groups.  When the deliverables for our group cannot be met, the new manager is replaced and the new, new manager lures back sufficient Junes that we can get the work done. 

One of my "favorite" discussion points in some academic groups is why we bother tolerating certain behavior when there are so many equally qualified, equally capable people that we don't have to allow the jerks to have any positions, let alone good ones.

I then think of one of our very special employees.  He won all the internal awards we have to give, many as the youngest person to win that award, and most of the ones in the field during his career.  He also spent most of his career on a behavioral improvement plan to avoid being fired.  While most retirees who wish to do so can arrange to be part-time for a period well into retirement, this individual was invited to a ceremony as a recipient of a life-time achievement award, lauded during the ceremony, marched out with security after the ceremony and told to never again darken our doorstep without a formal invitation and don't hold your breath for anything except scientific knowledge that literally no one else in the world knows.  Six months later, this person was invited to give a technical talk in a packed auditorium, but was not allowed the customary day of small-group discussions and someone in authority was right there ready to cut the microphone if the speaker deviated from the approved slides.

The genius who truly thinks differently may have value over the person who is pleasant enough, but not knock-your-socks-off brilliant.

[Hibush]

It is good to assess the jerk-to-genius ratio both on the individual and unit basis. A moderate J:G genius in a low J:G unit can work out. But even a moderate J:G in a unit really needs to watch the numbers. 

Thanks for the parable of the new new manager.