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1) Good morning, it's time to correct more information about English and history, courtesy of this latest George Will column in the Washington Post. Will is engaged in misinformation and specious reasoning. Let's fix it...
2) Will's central argument is that overbearing leftism among English and history professors has eroded student demand for these subjects and is therefore responsible for the decline in tenure-track jobs in these fields:
3) The trouble with this argument is that many STEM fields not generally associated with 'jargon' or 'leftism' or whatever have also experienced a massive decline in tenure-track jobs.
4) In biomedical science, for example--a field often bandied about as a hot ticket--the percentage of PhD graduates who land a tenure-track job within 6 years has plummeted from 50% to 15% between the 1970s and now. https://www.the-scientist.com/careers/addressing-biomedical-sciences-phd-problem-32258
5) The situation is similar in chemistry: https://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/2015/article/stem-crisis-or-stem-surplus-yes-and-yes.htm
6) Of course, much of the difficulty of finding tenure-track jobs in bio & chem is due to increases in PhDs awarded relative to steady or declining tenure-track positions available. In 2014 75% of all PhDs awarded in the US were in science and engineering: https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/phd-students-irrational/
7) But even as labor economists predict increased demand for STEM work--as they did for humanities professorships in 1989--the reality of which tenure-track jobs open up is not about PhD supply and student demand; it's about funding and expenditure strategies in higher ed.
8) A huge part of this equation is that state funding for public higher education has gone down by $9 billion in the last 10 years, leaving faculty hiring a low to impossible priority. This explanation isn't as salacious as Will's typical culture-wars BS, but much more plausible.
9) But another important part of the decline in tenure-track jobs *across the board* is indeed that corporate administrative strategies have taken root. See Ginsberg's _Fall of the Faculty_ for the figures: https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2011/07/14/fall-faculty
10) I'll end on a personal note: when I was in a non-tenure-track position at Georgetown, the demand for my courses was regularly 100-200% over the cap. My courses were banking Gtown half-a-million/year. Is that kind of demand ever rewarded in the 'marketplace'? No.
11) That's because simple econ 101 frameworks for understanding the politics and economics of higher ed just don't apply. But if you're a culture-warrior operating with motivated reasoning, everything looks like an SJW boogeyman or disaster to you. That's not thinking though.
12) If you want to understand the decline in tenure-track jobs, look at the decline in funding for public higher ed, and the management strategies of casualization applied in higher ed *just as they're applied outside of it*. /end
Addendum: I suspect there's a starve the beast effect to student demand in fields like English and history. Just look at the resources and admin support structures in other disciplines--especially biz schools--relative to these. We do student recruitment, liaise w/ admissions...
...write op-eds, host readings and events outside of class, etc., and we do it largely on our own time and without much admin support. We don't have 4 TAs and an admin assistant per professor. We don't have new classrooms with new tech, etc.
