August, 2021 Research Update

Amici!  It is now September!

And what a frantic August it has been.  The first week of the month was spent making a big push to finish the chapter I have been writing on the organization of the Roman military food supply for a proposed Companion volume on the ancient military food supply of Greece and Rome.  I was finally able to get that done (about 10,000 words) and submitted at the end of the first week of the month.  Then I had agreed to review a book for the Journal of Military History by the 10th, so I turned and did that.  That review should appear in the January edition of the JMH.  No expected date for the chapter yet except for 'the future' - the vagaries of book publishing timelines are very vague indeed.

I also recently had a podcast appearance go live; this one was recorded earlier in August with Russ Roberts at EconTalk.  You can listen to it here: https://t.co/qbY2DHvtLD?amp=1 or actually watch it (with me talking in my disaster-zone of a home office) here: https://youtu.be/74JwkaJiX-U .  I am told that EconTalk is a fairly large podcast, though I don't really have any context for that.  In any event it's a good conversion which wheels pretty freely from Roman imperialism and diversity to discussing 'warriors' and why Sparta is terrible.

After that it was a mad rush to get ready for classes to start.  Early in August, the College of Arts and Sciences here realized they had more students and fewer classes than expected (I have no idea how that even happens...) and so in a panic asked each of their constituent departments to increase the number of spots in their classes by 150.  The History department took advantage of the situation (and the funding) to give me a second class to teach, so I am now teaching a 90-student lecture of Global History of Warfare (with two TAs) and a 40 student section of History of Rome (just me).

Funnily enough, while I've had a syllabus and an outline for History of Rome ready for a long time, I had never actually gotten to teach the course myself, so this is a new 'prep.'  Which has left me scrambling a bit to write lectures and powerpoints.  To top off the mayhem, while I have taught the Global History of Warfare survey many times, it has always been on a M/W/F schedule, but this time it is on a T/Th schedule, which means fewer but longer lectures and so required some reorganizing in the syllabus.

And of course running alongside that has been my blogging, finishing out "The Queen's Latin" and then starting "Teaching Paradox: Victoria II."  The gaming-centered posts are always popular and VickyII has been no exception.

Finally, the seasonal academic job market is now upon us.  I've talked about this before, but it is worth discussing here because I think this year is likely to be uniquely disappointing.

First the basics (which again, we covered in more detail in August of last year): hiring for professors is seasonal.  Permanent (that is 'tenure track' positions which can lead to tenure) jobs are advertised in August-October, with applications for those jobs due in September-December.  Initial interviews then happen in November and December, followed by finalists doing a 'campus visit' usually in January or February.  More prestigious universities tend to post their jobs earlier in those windows (the Ivies in particular tend to have very early deadlines for everything).  Then in early spring, the process repeats, but for temporary (that is, adjunct) jobs.  The seasonality here is of course dictated by the fact that teaching needs follow the semester university calendar.

In the Humanities in general, the job market has never really been good at any point during my career.  As I've discussed, the losses in funding and hiring during the 2008/2009 financial crisis in the United States were never fully made up.  By 2019, things had started to get better but not good, mostly because history departments had begun to react to the failure of the job market to come back by restricting admissions, which you can see in this chart prepared by the American Historical Association:

Any possibility of recovery died of COVID in mid-march 2020.  The job market froze up completely (freezing some of my very talented graduate school colleagues out of jobs.  I ended up being very lucky to be able to get teaching in the 2020-2021 school year mostly because a neighboring university had both of its ancient historians going on leave at the same time) and the Fall 2020 job market was basically non-existent.  Nearly all of the large state school systems (which collectively make up about half of all university hiring, the other half made up by community colleges, selective private schools, small liberal arts colleges and for-profits all combined) had hiring freezes either de facto or de jure.

Now while COVID isn't gone, university operations are returning to normal and that is raising hopes that this year will redeem the historically bad job market of 2020.  I think that's unlikely for a number of reasons.

First, timing.  For a department to be posting jobs right now, they needed to have already gotten permission and funding from the university, set up a hiring committee and crafted a description for the posting.  In a lot of cases those processes would needed to have started earlier in the summer, when the university funding situation was much less certain.  My sense is that most schools right now are seeing very high enrollments as students flood back in for in-person classes, but that wasn't knowable back in June.

Now that could mean we'll see a lot of late postings, but I think it is more likely that we'll just see fewer postings as university administrators refuse to open funding lines for new searches.  In part, because of uncertainty, but also because many universities have clearly decided that COVID was an excellent excuse to further cut back their teaching budgets.

(Of course a university would think that cutting back on the teaching budget to make room for other, non-teaching functions is consistent with their education mission is beyond foolish, but I discuss at the link above the rationale for doing this and the pressures that lead to it.)

But even if timing weren't a problem that would likely lead to fewer jobs, the other problem rears its head: the flood.  Many of the top graduate programs in the country all did the same thing when it became clear that COVID was going to shut down the university: they extended all of their graduate students an extra year.

See, back in 2008/9, most graduate programs had not been very troubled by the Great Recession.  They reasoned - correctly if you look at that AHA chart - that hiring had always bounced back after recessions, usually exceeding new PhDs for several years, clearing out the backlog of underemployed PhDs.  You can see that happening in 1988-1993 and again in 2001-2007.  The job market had always bounced back so there was no need to take special measures.

And then the job market never bounced back (because - broken record I know - of structural changes I discuss in detail in the above-linked Atlantic article).  So they knew they had to do something and one thing they could do was restrict admissions (good) and then extend every graduate student who would have graduated for another year (with funding so they could eat).

To be clear, I believe that was the correct decision and my only complaint would be that programs didn't do enough of it (particularly in that I think at this stage graduate admissions in some of these fields should be nearly closed given the unavailability of jobs).

Now you might ask why running out the clock just one year would make any difference.  Well it relates to this other chart: 

For complicated reasons that I won't get into here (mostly because I think they are very stupid), departments overwhelmingly prefer to hire PhDs for tenure-track positions within the first year or so of getting their PhDs.  Each year from receiving the degree hurts your job prospects, even if you are actively teaching and publishing (this is sometimes referred to as a PhD going 'stale'; it used to be this process took half a decade or so, but with the job market being more competitive a PhD now goes 'stale' in about 24 months.  Presumably by this point my degree is not only stale but slightly mold encrusted, despite the fact that I have been actively teaching, researching and writing in the intervening time.)

Launching graduate students into a frozen market would waste their best possible year.  Their PhDs would be 'stale' before they had any meaningful number of jobs to apply to.  So instead of doing that (and also throwing them out of the program without a job), programs extended them another year with funding.  It was a humane choice within an inhumane and stupid hiring system (honestly, what other job looks for inexperience when hiring?)

But it means that this past spring (Spring 2021), graduate programs across the country graduated two classes of new PhDs at once.  Normally that sudden flood would be somewhat reduced because at least some of those new graduates would already have jobs lined up (gotten in their last year of dissertation writing as an 'ABD' - All But Dissertation), but there was no job market, so we're talking two full years of fresh PhDs all hitting the market at once.

A market that already had a post-2008/9 backlog that was never cleared.

So now a job market that was always likely to be anemic and have trouble even handling a normal load of PhDs is facing three of them: the class of 2020, the class of 2021, and the backlog of people who were on the market in Fall 2019 and Spring 2020 when the market froze (with me being in that last group).

I hate to be grim but it seems almost certain that what is going to happen here is that all three of those groups will be effectively sacrificed - when hiring resumes at normal levels next year, most hiring committees will treat all of them as if their degrees are stale, resetting the job market by simply dumping three+ years of junior academics into the trash.  Most, I suspect, will leave the field with little but bitterness for their efforts.

I am, of course, unusual in this.  I am the only junior scholar I know whose scholarly work produces a meaningful amount of income (hi!) which offers me a degree of stability and the confidence to proceed with my work, both scholarly and public-facing. 

(For those wondering 'What about Europe?'  My sense generally is that the hiring situation in most of Europe and the UK is at least as bad, in some cases worse.  Even where there aren't language barriers, overseas hiring committees also tend to show real reluctance to hire overseas scholars.  Heck, even getting a permanent academic job in the UK as an EU scholar is reported to be very difficult.)

In any event, I am of course applying to the jobs that are available.  Because so much of my work is in military history, I have a few more options than many of my colleagues: there is no hiring freeze in the US military's service academies or PME (Professional Military Education) institutions because COVID or no COVID, officers have to get trained.

But equally, I intend to continue if for no other reason than that self-destructive perseverance in the face of futility is the Roman way.  In any event, thank you all again for providing me with a measure of security and confidence with which I can continue to preserve in my chosen field.  It really does mean the world to me.