Jobseeking and Graduate Advising
A PhD director’s perspective
By Eric Weiskott
This is my third year directing our English PhD program. Among the most significant responsibilities I am charged with in this role is to advise advanced candidates and recent graduates who are seeking full-time jobs. Our graduates have had notable success gaining full-time academic jobs lately, on and off the tenure track. I thought I would use this post to explain what we are doing, and what full-time academic work looks like in the twenty-first century.
As has become common knowledge inside and outside of academia, the market for coveted full-time, tenure-track positions has been withering away for decades now. Calling it a ‘market’ at all is beginning to feel ludicrous. This is true across the board, but the humanities disciplines are the hardest hit. The reasons for this are multiple and would require a separate post to explain, but I’d like to highlight three interrelated overriding factors. All three are expressions of a neoliberal or marketized turn that US higher education and politics have been taking since the 1970s: (1) a significant increase in universities’ middle and upper administrative roles and relative pay; (2) an administration-mandated shift in emphasis from full-time, tenure-track to full-time, non-tenure-track and part-time (“adjunct”) faculty roles; (3) deep suspicion of non-monetizable humanistic knowledge and tenure protections in popular culture and political discourse. There was never really a moment when every newly minted humanities PhD could be assured of salaried in-field employment, as is true in medicine and a few other white-collar fields, or as is customary in the sciences, where specialist research knowledge is straightforwardly applicable to various lucrative industries. But in the humanities and beyond, things have been steadily deteriorating (see Townsend).
Today, our program’s placement rate into full-time academic work stands at 71% of all graduates since 2011. Other English PhD programs often do not make this statistic public, or strategically cloak it by, for example, retroactively discounting candidates who did not conduct a “national search,” that is, who did not apply to all available opportunities across the country. So it is difficult to make direct comparisons between programs as to placement. Still, we believe we have reason to take pride in our success. My guess is that we are outperforming several doctoral programs that are perceived as more prestigious than ours.
A career is more than a number. What does a ‘placement’ look like, really? Placements of our graduates from the last two years include
two tenure-track positions, at universities in Tennessee and in Korea;
a tenure-track special collections librarianship in Utah;
Visiting Assistant Professorships at two small liberal arts colleges in Massachusetts;
a writing services specialist position at an Ivy League university; and
full-time non-tenure-track teaching-oriented positions (typically titled “Professor of the Practice” or “Lecturer”) at three different secular and religiously affiliated colleges and universities in Massachusetts.
Each of these nine placements represents a unique graduate. These are fulfilling, permanent or renewable salaried roles in higher education with research, teaching, and/or administrative obligations.
So given very unfavorable conditions, what are we doing right? First, we are small and nimble. We are what I would describe as a boutique English PhD program. We intentionally keep incoming cohorts tiny, around 3–5 candidates each, so that we can lavish graduates with a lot of attention throughout their time with us. Our faculty-to-candidate ratio is 0.9, nearly 1-to-1. This counts only graduate faculty, which according to our department’s policies means tenure-track faculty. There is wide latitude for candidates to design their own path through coursework, exams, and teaching. We have developed rigorous guidelines for exams and for the dissertation but no prescriptive sense that each candidate’s arc through the stages must conform to a universal pattern.
With a trim cohort size at a large university like ours comes an extraordinary range of teaching opportunities. Many English PhD programs operate according to one of two teaching models. Either candidates teach first-year writing and literature courses early and repeatedly, or they teach only one or two courses near the end of their time in the program. The former model is characteristic of large state universities and flagship public universities, the latter of the Ivy League and other very top-ranked programs emulating the Ivy League. We have a different model, which we think is superior to either. After serving as teaching assistants (TAs), graduates are invited and required to design and teach, as sole instructor of record, four courses during their third and fourth years—that is, in the middle of their years at Boston College. These courses range from introductory writing right up to a self-designed elective in the candidate’s field, something few early-career applicants have under their belts. There is a world of difference between describing, in a job application letter, an elective you would like to teach one day and describing one you have in fact taught.
More than anything, our success is due to the tireless work of my colleagues who teach the required PhD professionalization seminar “Advanced Research Colloquium” (for many years, Aeron Hunt), serve as job placement officer (for several years, James Najarian), sit on dissertation committees, serve on mock interview committees for candidates with upcoming interviews, and comment on job application materials. A few colleagues are graduate advising superstars, carrying three, four, or even five PhD advisees at once and doing an excellent job of it. This work is unglamorous, unremunerated, and all too often unacknowledged. I am glad to be able to acknowledge it publicly here. The work has real consequences: our PhDs fare much better than they would if they had to piece together a sense of professional momentum all on their own.
When I assumed the directorship of the PhD program in 2021, I set out to learn as much as I could about where things stood, in order to be the best adviser and advocate I could be. I interviewed all thirty-three current candidates at that time; I consulted with colleagues who have a history of investment in graduate teaching and advising; I tabulated placement statistics; and I calculated how our PhD stipend compared with competitor programs, with a view to making the case for a raise. (Which I did, successfully, last year.) Figuring out what is actually happening is the most vital—but sometimes overlooked!—first step to taking any interventional action.
Knowing our placement numbers and outcomes, we can calibrate our graduate advising conversations to match the reality. Contrary to the gloomy discourse that has gripped English departments for decades, there are full-time academic jobs out there, and most of our graduates at BC eventually land in one, typically after one to three years of searching. But the conditions of the work have changed along with the deepening precarity of pretty much every aspect of the US economy. (A colleague at a New England college recently remarked to me that she used to feel obliged to dissuade bright undergraduates from entering graduate school, warning them that there was no guarantee of a job afterwards. But nowadays, she observed, what profession is safe? We hear of the erosion and precarity of salaried work in elementary and secondary education, journalism, law, even medicine and the large tech companies of Silicon Valley.) Increasingly, the full-time academic roles our graduates are finding are non-tenure-track and emphasize teaching talent or administrative acumen over research renown. Some smaller colleges are staffing their field electives via full-time, fixed-term Visiting Assistant Professorships, hoping to eventually make the case for a permanent hire.
On the basis of these results, I have advised my colleagues that we need to be cautious, and always flexible in our thinking, when speaking with graduate advisees about placement. But we can also be confident that a PhD in English from BC possesses a lot of market value in terms of research and teaching preparation. We have been agile and successful in recent years and I know we can continue to be so.
Further reading
Townsend, Robert. “An Honest Assessment: The State of Graduate Education.” In The Reimagined PhD: Navigating Twenty-First Century Humanities Education, ed. Leanne M. Horinko, Jordan M. Reed, and James M. Van Wyck, 3–9. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2021.