Medieval Ph.D. Registry Project

REGISTRY REPORT: 2000

Roger Dahood, Project Director
rdahood@u.arizona.edu

The Medieval Ph.D. Registry Project is an ongoing effort, sponsored by the Medieval Academy of America’s Committee on Centers and Regional Associations (CARA) with technical support from the University of Arizona Faculty Center for Instructional Innovation, to track the employment status of recipients, 1995 and later, of U.S. and Canadian Ph.D. degrees in medieval subject areas. For purposes of the Registry, “medieval” refers to the period from about 500 to about 1500. At the CARA meeting at Arizona State University in Tempe, Arizona (October 1999), the CARA Executive Committee reaffirmed the principle that personal information in the Registry database will be treated as confidential.

Recipients of U.S. and Canadian medieval Ph.D.s from 1995 onward, including recipients who are seeking full-time, part-time, academic, or non-academic employment, and those who for any reason are not seeking employment, are asked to return completed Registry forms. Graduate students are asked to return a Registry form during the academic year in which they receive the Ph.D., and all participants are asked to update their Registry entries as their employment status changes.

A more detailed account of the Registry Project, including a sampling of questions the database can help address, appears in “The Medieval Ph.D. Registry Project,” Medieval Academy News, 134 (September 1999), 3–5. In addition to the fields identified there, fields surveyed now include Ancient Language and Classical Literature. After 1999 the Registry will not survey Mass Communications, which in 1995–1999 yielded no medieval Ph.D.s.

From 1995 through 1999 the U.S. and Canada produced on average some 250 medieval Ph.D.s per year.1 The numbers may go higher if future volumes of Dissertation Abstracts International record additional dissertations from those years. Below are a brief account of the job market in calendar years 1997 and 1998 in English and History, the most populous fields, and an update of figures for 1995 and 1996. The numbers of successful job seekers shown derive from a number of sources. The best information comes directly to the Registry from Ph.D. recipients, dissertation advisers, and departments. Otherwise the Registry relies chiefly on information published by the American Historical Association, the Medieval Academy of America, the Modern Language Association of America, and Lingua Franca.2 I have supplemented the printed sources with information from the Web pages of various institutions and departments and in some cases through individual inquiries by e-mail and telephone.

Upward adjustments in the numbers of 1995 and 1996 Ph.D.s result from either new entries in Dissertation Abstracts or re-classification of Ph.D. recipients to English or History from other fields since publication of the earlier figures. Two factors explain the downward adjustments in the figures for 1995 and 1996. First, I have excluded from the revised numbers the 1995 and 1996 Ph.D.s who are not and were not seeking tenure track (TT) positions. Second, I have excluded cases to which the attribution of TT status now seems doubtful. For the previous report the TT status of Ph.D.s who hold academic posts but have not responded to the survey had to be inferred from sometimes outdated or incomplete information in the printed sources. Crosschecking of the printed information against increasingly available on-line faculty rosters and campus directories has raised questions about the accuracy of some of those inferences. For example, some whom the printed sources list as “Assistant Professors” appear on Web sites as “Visiting Assistant Professors” or “Adjunct Assistant Professors.” Others appear in a university’s on-line directory but not on the same university’s departmental roster (or vice versa), or they fail to appear at all. Still other Ph.D.s are recent hires to positions of “Assistant Professor,” but about the TT status of the appointments I have no other indication. I have regularly excluded such cases from the present TT figures. The numbers of successful job seekers may thus be higher or lower than indicated here, and the numbers of new Ph.D.s competing in the academic job market may be smaller by an indeterminate amount than indicated here.

In 1997 and 1998 new medieval Ph.D.s in English numbered about 73 and 75, respectively. Of the 1997 cohort, one known to be a retiree not seeking employment and one in a TT post before he took the Ph.D. are excluded from the calculations. Of the remaining 71, 35 (49.3%)3 report finding employment, as follows: 23 (32.4%) TT or continuing appointments (including 1 in a high school and 3 who had previously held non-TT positions),4 1 (1.4%) non-TT appointment at an institution with no tenure system, 8 (11.3%) temporary academic appointments (including 1 in a high school library), 2 (2.8%) long-term non-academic appointments, and 1 (1.4%) temporary non-academic appointment. If we count the appointment at the institution with no tenure system as long-term, 33.8% of Ph.D.s in medieval English report securing TT/long-term positions. Of the 1998 cohort, one is known not to be a new hire and is excluded from the calculations. Of the remaining 74, 40 (54.1%) report finding jobs: 29 (39.2%) TT appointments (including 7 who had previously held non-TT positions) and 11 (14.9%) temporary academic appointments.

Table 1 summarizes the data for TT positions 1995–1998. It includes in round brackets the figures for 1995–1996 published previously. The left-hand column gives the total number of new Ph.D.s who were or are still seeking academic employment. The double figures for 1997 reflect TT totals excluding and including the non-TT position at the institution with no tenure system. The two right-most columns show the distribution among TT females, males, and Ph.D.s whose sex is unknown.

Table 1: Medieval Ph.D.s in English in 1995–1998 and Number of Males and Females in Tenure-Track Positions

The total of new medieval Ph.D.s in History is 67 in 1997 and 65 in 1998. Of the 1997 cohort, one is known to be deceased and is excluded from the calculations. Of the remaining 66, 36 (54.5%) report finding employment: 24 (36.4%) TT appointments (including 3 who previously held non-TT posts),5 9 (13.6%) temporary academic appointments (including 1 post-doctoral fellowship and 1 editorship at a scholarly journal), and 3 (4.5%) temporary non-academic appointments (including 1 appointment at a private management company, 1 clinical fellowship at a private health care provider, and 1 appointment as an otherwise unspecified administrative aide). Of the 1998 cohort, one known not to be a new hire and one who considered only positions at law schools are excluded from the calculations. Of the remaining 63, 32 (50.8%) report finding employment: 19 (30.2%) TT appointments (including 1 half-time TT appointment and 4 who previously held non-TT posts), 12 (19%) temporary appointments (including 1 stipendiary teaching assistantship), and 1 (1.6%) appointment identified neither as long-term nor temporary (a high school teaching appointment). If we count the high school post as long-term, the number in TT/long-term positions rises to 20 (31.7%).

Table 2, in the same format as Table 1 above, summarizes the results for TT/long-term positions 1995–1998. The double figures for 1998 reflect the two ways of classifying the high school position identified as neither temporary nor long-term.

Table 2: Medieval Ph.D.s in History in 1995–1998 and Number of Males and Females in Tenure-Track Positions

Annual variation in the number of graduates earning Ph.D.s and in the number securing TT appointments is to be expected and, as the above record indicates, may be dramatic. It would be hazardous to extrapolate trends from the data so far collected, for many variables contribute to the number of Ph.D.s produced and the number of placements made in a given year. As the database timeline lengthens, we will perhaps be in a better position to identify meaningful year-to-year patterns. For now, we can make only tentative observations.

The calendar year 1996 appears to have produced by far the lowest number of new Ph.D.s in English and the lowest number obtaining TT/long-term posts. The four-year average for TT/long-term academic hires in English is about 31–32% (101 or 102/283), but the difference in the success rates of the least successful (1996) and most successful (1998) cohort is about 15%. Looked at another way, in 1995–1998 the proportion of new Ph.D.s in medieval English not securing TT/long-term employment averaged 68–69% and ranged between about 60.8% and 75.8%.

History appears to have produced substantially fewer Ph.D.s in 1995 and 1996 than in 1997 and 1998, and, if the data can be trusted, a substantially higher percentage of the latter two cohorts entered TT positions. On average for the four years, History produced around 60 Ph.D.s per year, but the total in the latter two years amounts to an increase of about 21% (22/103). The percentage spread of those securing TT positions is likewise substantial. The average success rate for the four years is about 25% (58 or 59/236), but the difference between the least successful (1995) and most successful (1997) cohort is just over 25%. Looked at another way, in 1995–1998 the proportion of new Ph.D.s in medieval History not securing TT/long-term employment averaged 75% and ranged between 63.6% and 88.9%.

There is risk, as indicated earlier, that the Registry data somewhat exaggerate the difficulty of securing a TT/long-term post. It seems likely that some successful TT/long-term placements have been excluded as doubtful or overlooked and that an indeterminate number of new Ph.D.s included in the calculations completed their degrees with no intention of seeking TT/long-term academic employment. Even allowing for a considerable margin of error, however, in 1995–1998 the likelihood of obtaining TT appointment for most new English and History Ph.D.s was not high.

The Registry grew out of concern, aired at a CARA meeting in 1997, about the state of the profession, and in particular what prolonged constriction of the job market might mean for medieval studies. Although the Registry offers only a partial picture of the job market new Ph.D.s have recently faced, it is a sharper picture than we have had before, and one that can serve as a starting point for future discussion.

Notes

1. I have compiled the figures from dissertations noted in Dissertation Abstracts International, A: The Humanities and Social Sciences, 55–60 (1995–99), passim.

2. Directory of History Departments and Organizations in the United States and Canada: 25th Edition. 1999–2000, ed. Liz Townsend and Robert B. Townsend (Washington, D.C., 1999); Medieval Academy Directory 2000 (Cambridge, Mass., 2000); and Directory, PMLA 114 (1999), and PMLA 115 (2000); “Job Tracks,” Lingua Franca 8 (February 1998), 57–86, esp. 75–79; 9 (February 1999), 61–93, esp. 81–85; and 10 (February 2000), 61–93, esp. 80–85. I am grateful to the many new Ph.D.s who have returned completed Registry forms and to senior scholars who have responded to queries about the status of their recent graduates. I inadvertently omitted from my acknowledgments in the previous report the name of Geoffrey Koziol, who furnished leads on a number of graduates of the University of California, Berkeley. I am especially indebted in the present update to Michael Cornett of Duke University for providing leads on the status of a number of 1997 and 1998 Duke Ph.D.s.

3. Percentages are rounded to the nearest tenth. Stated total percentages may thus differ slightly from the sums of the subcategories.

4. Of the 1995 cohort, 6, and of the 1996 cohort, 2 or possibly 3 now in TT or long-term positions previously held non-TT posts. The previously published figures were 7 for 1995 and 1 for 1996.

5. Of the 1995 cohort, zero, and of the 1996 cohort, 3 now in TT or long-term positions previously held non-TT posts. The previously published figures were zero for 1995 and 2 for 1996.