We need to thank James Grossman and Allison Miller for taking the time to respond to our essay, “A Moral Stain on the Profession.” We admire the tough work the American Historical Association (AHA) does on behalf of our career and are aware of the limitations the agency and its leadership face in an age. At the same time, historical mistruths are rampant, budgets for the humanities are being cut, and history majors are in decline. We hold no non-public animus towards Grossman, Miller, or any of the team of workers at the AHA, who we believe have the profession’s excellent pastimes at coronary heart and who labor under situations that can be much less than perfect.
Furthermore, we do not think the AHA is in any meaningful manner responsible for the prevailing, degraded condition of the arts — certainly, we particularly stated in our piece that “the AHA did not reason this [jobs] crisis.” Rather, our critique becomes a structural one. We sought to suggest that the medium and lengthy terms may assist a “lost technology” of unemployed historians in discovering the tenure-track jobs for which they have been educated. We are sorry that Miller and Grossman located our essay a “travesty” and our claims “specious,” indicative of “sheer ahistorical.”
First, we concede that the AHA can’t arrange moves in its modern-day shape as a 501(c)(3) employer. As Miller rightly states, the AHA could need to “change [e] its venture” to achieve this. But this was precisely our factor: Given the occasions of the history activity marketplace, the AHA’s challenge needs to exchange. Presently, the AHA’s emphasis on career variety unwittingly accedes to the defunding of the arts that have characterized U.S. Academia for decades. The AHA, in different words, has a standard that tenure-music lines will not go back and has organized itself around accommodating this “fact.” As Joy Connolly writes, “Inside the great of times, the range of instructional jobs will continually be fewer than the variety of students graduating each yr.” Our query is: Why? Why can’t we organize society’s assets differently? After all, we live in an exceptionally wealthy world, and tenure-song professors are virtually no longer very expensive. Why now not paintings to convert the austerity focus that has degraded academic images in place of merely accepting it? Grossman affirms “that the AHA does now not have the electricity to restore” a past in which tenure-song jobs had been ample. But how will we recognize if we don’t even try?
Relatedly, we’re a chunk at a loss for words as to why converting the AHA’s undertaking might, in Miller’s phrasing, “hur[t] the labor movement” instead of offering this movement with a centrally-prepared frame that could help it reach its desires.
But Grossman and Miller’s factors regarding the AHA’s prison reputation are at the end of secondary importance to our thesis that a focus on career range, alternative careers, or alt-ac jobs (anything period one wishes to use) distracts from what must turn out to be the AHA’s crucial assignment: advocating and organizing to make certain that history departments continue to be strong and enduring highbrow spaces inside our universities and colleges. We trust that the protection of tenure-track jobs, and tenure itself, is crucial to this aim. Without stable employment, history will no longer be written.
Moreover, the reality stays that the number one purpose of getting a Ph.D. In history to, become a tenure-song professor. Indeed, the overwhelming majority of graduate college students within the humanities who input a Ph.D. Application wants careers at the tenure song. This is borne out in 2017 survey records collected by the Rackham Graduate School of the University of Michigan, in which 84 percent of first-yr humanities students polled stated they hoped to grow to be tenure-music professors. But as Grossman notes in his response, the most effective 47 percent of those who acquired records Ph. D.S between 2004 and 2013 have a task at the tenure song — and the quantity is undoubtedly an awful lot smaller for folks who acquired their Ph.D. After 2009. Positioned, measuring the tenure-music fulfillment of pre-2009 Ph. D.S. is like measuring the ice stability of Greenland’s glaciers earlier than industrialization; it doesn’t tell us plenty about the present state of affairs. The AHA has to propose on behalf of folks who, below the current machine, want tenure-music jobs but can’t get them.