These remarks were originally delivered at the 2023 meeting of the American Historical Association in Philadelphia, as part of a round table discussion called “Labor and Compensation in the Historical Profession.”
When their jobs were threatened in a new and acute way in the first few months of the pandemic, many tenured and tenure-track historians were able to recognize themselves as workers, sometimes for the first time. The specter of higher ed’s imminent collapse prompted many of them to ask for solidarity and support from the colleagues they have long refused to fully acknowledge as colleagues.
Even as they saw themselves as exploited laborers, few were able to acknowledge—or even seemed aware—that these conditions predated the pandemic for adjuncts. Fewer still were ready to reckon with the ways that their employment was dependent on the continuation of those conditions. The lack of solidarity with striking adjuncts and grad students during this year of labor action confirms this disconnect, and it should not be surprising—the interests of these groups of employees are not the same, and are often directly opposed.
The quick collapse of higher education may not have come to pass, but the hollowing-out has accelerated, especially for history, assisted by sustained political efforts from without and within. Anyone who thinks they made it through, that they’re safe, is laboring under a delusion, and reality is swiftly catching up with them.
Like all hierarchical systems, adjunctification has always harmed the people in the middle of the hierarchy as well—because, of course, tenured and tenure-track faculty are not the top of this hierarchy. “Burnout” is a serious and growing problem, especially for scholars of marginalized groups; it’s making you all miserable, and leading some to leave the profession altogether. But let’s be clear: this “burnout” that secure scholars are feeling is phantom pain where their colleagues should be. Or, to use a term that every other normal worker in the US uses to describe their workplace under these conditions: you are suffering from the effects of intentional systemic understaffing.
Jobs numbers in the field always cause a yearly freakout, but this fall the panic hit a new level. Out of 1799 historians who received a PhD in the US between 2019 and 2020, 175 have full-time faculty positions. 1 To be quite honest, a large part of that was because the numbers were so stark that even graduate students at elite programs couldn’t ignore the fact that they were in trouble—you always were, your department just worked to hide that fact from you.
But it’s not just about incoming faculty. It’s about lost lines, the erosion of departments, the disappearance of majors. And it’s deeply connected to the broader problems facing history as a field of study in K-16 education—the perpetual concern over what majors get jobs, of course, but also the concerted political attacks on the field and its practitioners, most of whom teach without whatever protections academic freedom theoretically provides. And it’s about teaching, which is what every normal person in the world thinks is our main job, and which the field as a whole does not prioritize, train for, reward, or even really understand.
The other problem, unfortunately, is that nothing can really change working field by field or campus by campus, and the main professional organization for our field—reflecting the views of the majority of its members, and certainly the privilege of its elected leaders—has chosen to sit this one out. At the most, the AHA does “advocacy”—that is not the same as building power and exercising it, and as a result, it is not often effective. We see this on the individual and departmental level as well, even from self-styled radical activist professors who end up being too scared to do anything more than sign a petition. Maybe the provost who came out of electrical engineering doesn’t respect what historians do, not just because he’s in STEM, but because every cultural signal around him in this country tells him historians are to be used, even humored, but not respected—and certainly not feared. And everything we have done as a field seems to confirm that belief. And now things are very bad, and it’s time to accept that we cannot advocate and petition our way out of this position.
Just as efforts on individual campuses and in individual fields can only go so far, piecemeal solutions to prop up various aspects of the profession or compensate for their failures—including all of the things the people up here, including myself, are engaging in—these things will not save the profession.
There is no path to saving this profession that does not begin with coming to grips with the fact that no scholar in the US can truly be secure if their colleagues are insecure. The differences between me and Varsha, between me and Ben, between me and you—those have been made to seem really significant by the culture of our field. Our field has continued to pretend there’s a huge difference between the skills and qualifications of tenure-track professors and adjuncts, but to the neoliberal university, a tenured professor is just some jerk taking up a valuable adjunct line. The arguments that justify adjunct labor can be and are turned around on those who thought their positions were secure, a point adjuncts have been making for decades. Imagined meritocracies mean little to extractive institutions.
Even if we can do that, we must also accept that the people best suited to organize and defend our field are probably not going to be found among the elite who generally populate its leadership positions. The field is facing an existential crisis, and addressing it should be the main concern of its leadership every time they interact with the non-academic public, especially journalists. If the leaders of this organization don’t know how to do this—if they do not understand the gravity of the situation, if they are too scared to make waves, if they are lacking the capacity and training to do this work—they should step aside, and the organization should figure out how to elect, employ, and pay the people who do know how to do it. I don’t know if our field can be saved, but I know that it cannot be saved unless it is saved for everyone, and I have seen little to convince me that this organization and its leaders think about the vast majority of the people they purport to represent. Save it for everyone, or it will be gone.
- Steven Mintz, “What Should We Do About Undergrads Who Want to Pursue a Humanities Doctorate?” Inside Higher Ed, December 15, 2022. Accessed January 5, 2023.
