Comments on this thread, which began as a discussion of accusations of tokenism against women graduate students, veered off into discussions of (the perception) of effects of AA on "the job market."
A couple of comments caught my eye. One (#34) was that "Your fellow graduate students are not your competition, they are your colleagues.... Unlike your faculty advisers, your fellow students will know what it's like to be a graduate student at this school at this time, facing this job market. And they will (or should!) also be an important part of your professional network as you do enter into the job market." Another (#37) was that "people born in the 80's already have a (fairly understandable) generational grudge against the baby boomers."
I want to make two points here, about when the post-PhD TT "job market" changed, and who competes against whom.
First, about the "generational grudge." When seen as more PhDs than TT jobs, the "jobs crisis" has actually been the labor structure of the political economy of HE since the mid-70s. Here's Michael Bérubé, writing about MLA schools, but I have little reason to doubt there are significant parallels with philosophy:
Since 1970 doctoral programs have been producing many more job candidates than there are jobs; and yet this is not entirely a supply-side problem, because over those 40 years, academic jobs themselves have changed radically. Of the 1.5 million people now employed in the profession of college teaching, more than one million are teaching off the tenure track, with no hope or expectation of ever winding up on the tenure track. Many of them do not have Ph.D.'s: According to the 2004 National Study of Postsecondary Faculty (the last such study conducted), 65.2 percent of non-tenure-track faculty members hold the M.A. as their highest degree—57.3 percent teach in four-year institutions, 76.2 percent in two-year institutions (many holding more than one part-time position).
Second, about competition and colleagues: Bérubé's outlining of the reality of who competes against whom requires that we change our frame of reference from "graduate students preparing for the (post-PhD TT) job market" to "the labor structure of the political economy of HE." As I put it here:
When we change the frame of reference like that, we see the context for the (post-PhD) job market includes post-BA labor of graduate assistants (either as TAs in charge of sections, or in charge of discussion groups, or as graders of essays) as well as part-time and full-time instructors with BA, MA, or PhD, and post-docs with teaching duties. To put it in a formula: the real job market for philosophy teachers begins post-BA, so that PhDs are not just competing against other PhDs but also against anyone else who teaches philosophy, holders of the BA and MA included. [UPDATE: and now with MOOCS we have to factor in (or at least increasingly factor in) undergraduate labor as providing "calibrated peer review." (For another post on MOOCs, see here.)]
[UPDATE, 10:10 am, CDT, 18 Aug]: of course I don't mean to imply with the use of the term "structure" that there aren't fluctuations (including severe downturns post 2008) in the post-PhD TT segment of the structure. It's just that these fluctuations need to be seen in long-term perspective.]
[UPDATE 2, 10:15 am: When I was in graduate school in the 1980s, the story was that "in the early 90s there will be a wave of retirements and the job market will turn to a sellers market." Well, there was just such a wave, but it coincided with a renewed wave of hiring into precarious positions, as admins would replace 2 or 3 tenured retirements with 1 TT post and turn to TAs, adjuncts, post-docs, and the like to make up the difference.]
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