Anthony Grafton and James Grossman, “Plan C,” Perspectives on History 49:8 (November 2011) (original) (raw)
Related papers
#Alt-Academy: Alternative Careers for Academic Scholars
2021
This e-book is the first volume of the online publication #Alt-Academy. Edited by Bethany Nowviskie, this volume contains all 24 essays published by the 32 authors who contributed to #Alt-Academy's initial collection. The following text, also by Nowviskie, is from the 2011 website launch: #Alt-Academy was created by and for people with deep training and experience in the humanities, working or seeking employment — generally off the tenure track, but within the academic orbit — in universities and colleges, or allied knowledge and cultural heritage institutions such as museums, libraries, academic presses, historical societies, and governmental humanities organizations. The work of such institutions is enriched and enabled by capable "alternative academics." Although they are rarely conventionally-employed as faculty members, the people contributing to #Alt-Academy maintain a research and publication profile and bring their methodological and theoretical training to bea...
2008
of the Arts, have been wonderful leaders and partners, shaping not only the broad goals of the Initiative, but also its most practical manifestations. Jan Cohen-Cruz, the director of Imagining America, brought the force of her discernment, the weight of her own deep experience, and the lift of her good cheer to this project. Her confidence carried us through. Imagining America is lucky to have David Scobey as its board chair. His idioms and wisdom pervade this report. Kal Alston, Associate Provost at Syracuse University, has also served as a true intellectual partner and collaborator with us on the development of this report even as she leads that institution's charge to clarify and implement the reward structures that will support the University's vision of Scholarship in Action. Along with Chancellor Cantor, Vice Chancellor Eric Spina, and academic leadership across the campus, she has focused faculty attention on engaged public scholarship and leveraged material support for the Tenure Team project at Syracuse. This report has benefited from numerous collaborations and consultations. An informal think tank grew up around this document and the background study that preceded it. This group included our "72-hour readers," to whom we owe particular thanks, and other colleagues whose comments were invaluable:
A Move to Bring Staff Scholars Out of the Shadows
Three years ago, we wrote about our experiences as Ph.D.'s who had initially planned to become faculty members but instead found ourselves forging careers as professional staff members at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
The Humanities and the Professions: The University of Baltimore Model
1988
In an effort to infuse professional and preprofessional academic programs with liberal arts learning, this project at the University of Baltimore (Maryland) resulted in the establishment of a requlred liberal arts core curriculum for upper division students. The project provided funding for three activities: interdisciplinary team teaching of the courses in the core curriculum, release time for core course coordinators for curriculum planning, and faculty development seminars (called Humanities and the Professions) which used literature to highlight ethical and professional conflicts. Core courses were titled: Ideas in Writing, Modern City, Arts and Ideas, World Cultures, and Business, Values and Society. The major project outcome was development of support for the upper-division core curriculum among the faculty, students, and administrators. Othor benefits included increased interaction of 1. Funds to support team-teaching. 2. Released time for Core Course Coordinators.
International Public History
With apologies to Charles Dickens, "It was the worst of times, it was the best of times." 1 It was the mid-1970s, a time of misery and disappointment for hundreds of new PhDs in history in the United States, virtually all of them groomed for college and university teaching, and competing for far too few jobs. But it was also the beginning of public history as a field of graduate history education, a development that would revitalize both the teaching and the practice of the discipline and which continues to expand its horizons to the present day. Public history came into my life in the spring of 1977 when I saw an advertisement in the AHA Newsletter announcing a search for a project coordinator who would staff a new initiative sponsored by the American Historical Association (AHA), the Organization of American Historians (OAH), and several regional and specialized history groups. 2 The aim of this new effort was to address what had come to be considered a crisis in the employment market for new PhDs in history-a crisis fueled by unprecedented growth in the number and size of history doctoral education programs created as a part of the expansion of American higher education after World War II. By the mid 1970s, however, that growth in higher education had run its course, ending with a sharp drop in the need for new faculty in history and many other fields. The National Coordinating Committee for the Promotion of History (NCC), as the new effort was inelegantly named, was meant not only to identify and publicize existing employment opportunities for newly minted PhD historians in and around the academy, but also to explore what were called "non-traditional" positions or "alternative" careers as well. Curious, and in need of employment myself, I sent a letter of application to AHA's executive director Mack Thompson, landed an interview, and ultimately a job-the best job I ever had because, as it turned out, I had to invent it. Other than the initial job advertisement for a Project Director of the NCC, there was little structure and budget for this position. I was provided decent but modest salary, a desk in a renovated bathroom on the top floor of the American Historical Association headquarters at 400 A Street on Capitol Hill in Washington, DC, and telephone numbers of several historians in the Washington area who had agreed to chair resource groups in possible employment areas like federal government, state and local government, business, and historic preservation. But what exactly was the problem? Too few jobs? Too many historians? Or historians insufficiently prepared for positions that might actually exist? A book on the shelves of the AHA library yielded a partial answer to the first two questions, and the contacts I had been given for the resource groups shed welcome light on the third. The Education of Historians in the United States, published in 1962, was the work of an AHA Commission on Graduate Education in History, established in 1958 with support from the Carnegie Commission of New York to investigate issues of supply and demand for PhD historians in the near future. Under the leadership of Tulane University historian John Snell the Graduate Education Commission undertook a detailed examination of past production of history doctorates and projected likely needs for the near future, based on population trends. The resulting report was relatively conservative. It did not, for example, advocate for new outside sources of support for graduate study in history, recommending instead that some history departments not currently offering graduate education consider doing so, and calling on existing graduate programs to modestly increase their enrollments. 3 Throughout the report, however, the focus was on the PhD as a preparation for college and university teaching, not careers in museums, corporations, archives, government agencies and elsewhere. The lesson it drew, for example, from considering an earlier era of unemployment of young historians during the Great Depression of the 1930s, was simple: "In 1939, probably no more than two-thirds of the history PhDs of 1931-35 were engaged in teaching in universities, colleges, and junior colleges but others would have been teaching if they could have found positions." 4 Clearly the historical profession was not going to be prepared for what happened in the 1970s, when there were academic job openings for scarcely more than half of new doctorates.
Making History at the History Conference: Bringing Research Mentoring to the AHA Annual Meeting
Perspectives on History: The Newsmagazine of the American Historical Association, 2012
From a graduate student's perspective, the big annual meeting of any research field can be a daunting experience. In a tight job market, the American Historical Association plays host to high-stakes job interviews, appointments with potential publishers, and conversations with journal editors. And then, of course, there are the paper presentations and discussions. To make conferences more user-friendly for graduate students, the AHA and other associations now offer special mentoring sessions in which graduate students and professors meet informally for advice on various aspects of the profession. As an alumnus of such mentoring programs myself, I think they are a useful and important. Nevertheless there is a cart-before-the-horse quality to our grad student mentoring. Advice on job searches, publication, and life as an assistant professor all presuppose the core activity of our profession: doing research.