Walking the Walk When Talking about Alt Ac

by Carine Mardorossian and Joseph Valente

In 2015, the National Endowment of the Humanities (NEH) launched a pilot program entitled “Next Generation Humanities PhD Planning Grants” to encourage a reframing of how humanities PhD programs prepare their students:

Data collected by the Humanities Indicators project show that humanities PhDs pursue careers in many different professions, both inside and outside academia. Yet most humanities PhD programs in the United States still prepare students primarily for tenure-track positions at colleges and universities—positions that are increasingly in short supply. NEH Next Generation Humanities PhD grants seek to address the disparities between graduate student expectations for a career in academia and eventual career outcomes and to promote greater integration of the humanities in the public sphere. These grants will allow colleges and universities to plan for major changes to PhD programs and then implement programmatic initiatives that will transform understanding of what it means to be a humanities scholar. (Press Release, National Endowment for the Humanities)

In other words, the job market crisis in the humanities has increasingly led the profession to publicly advocate for “Alternative Academic” (Alt Ac ) as the viable alternative for our academic-job-deprived PhDs in the humanities.1 The idea is to change how and what we teach so that our students can become even more marketable in a wider array of careers.

Alongside this renewed focus, many have been keen to defend the humanities by attributing alt-ac success stories not to students’ resourcefulness and networking abilities, but to their tangentially related training in their discipline of choice. These advocates have been quick to point out, for instance, that the analytical reasoning and critical thinking skills the humanities teach students answer the express needs of 80% of employers; they cite the 2012 survey of about 600 CEOs and company leaders, 60% of whom had undergraduate degrees in the humanities, to infer that their earlier training was instrumental to their career success (Terras et al; Dutta). In other words, they are increasingly confident about our students’ competitiveness for the parallel careers that exist in the marketplace and that will somehow conveniently compensate for higher education’s decline in tenure-track lines. What is more, those who dare critique this turn to Alt Ac as the troublingly easy answer to a complex phenomenon are often accused of an ill-considered elitism or idealism.2

We believe that these exhortations in support of Alt Ac conveniently ignore, elide, or obfuscate the fact that “adjunctification”—which grounds not just the erosion of tenure but the bloating of high-priced administrative careers and salaries at the expense of tenurable positions—is a rectifiable driver of the job market crisis in the humanities. We will argue that unless Alt Ac is explicitly contextualized in relation to the triangulated dynamic that led to the erosion of tenure (adjunctification/administrification/job market crisis), we need to refrain from promoting it as anything other than as the band-aid approach that obscures higher education’s administrative takeover by our very own 1%. We will further offer an alternative form of Alt Ac to offset this profit-making cooptation of the university’s core intellectual mission.

It stands to reason that the upper administrative class, i.e. those who have been directing the very redistribution of institutional resources from which they benefit so dramatically, will look to justify their own extreme salaries by adjunctifying in lieu of deploying their budgets in the service of tenure-track positions. We have been directed to think of adjunctification in relation (and opposition) to tenure-track positions, which has conveniently obscured the triangulation through which “administrification” assumes the role of neutral arbiter between a problem (tenure-track) and its putative solution (adjunctification). The “job market” is evoked as a kind of academic “invisible hand,” a separate and amorphous entity outside of the university’s control and sphere of influence, rather than a direct reflection of the class division created through triangulation by and within higher education: between the managerial/administrative classes on the one hand and the caretaking/teaching classes on the other (Graeber). Rather than capitulate to the idea of adjuncts as a way of saving what is left of tenure, we should be thinking about how many contingent faculty could be tenure-track were the salaries of administrators who are actively eroding tenure not so unreasonably inflated. Each of these multiplying administrators in turn requires an increasing number of nonacademic staff to function, to whom they delegate tasks and decision-making that were once the purview of shared governance. As a result, in U.S. colleges, professors are now outnumbered by non-academic professional staff (Berman) who may or may not have anything at stake in preserving a marginalized faculty’s intellectual autonomy or academic freedom.

Blaming the job market for this sad state of affairs not only misapprehends the problem, it purposively avoids the solution: a restructuring of the university designed to ensure more equitable job prospects for its various constituents. The primary issue, we argue, is not the adjunctification of the university but its “administrification” and attendant professional “staffication.” In locating the problem outside of academia, the rhetoric of Alt Ac obscures what is first and foremost an internal crisis derived from an accelerating concentration of scarce resources. It also plays into the hands of the neoliberal substitution of the caretaking ethos of the university with a managerial one (which Graeber refers to as “bullshit jobs”). It is a tacit form of gaslighting when, in the face of this purloined reality, Alt Ac is brandished as the solution to a crisis that is constantly misnamed and misrecognized.

In their Chronicle essay, “A Moral Stain on the Profession,” Daniel Bessner and Michael Brenes state, “As the humanities collapse, it’s time to name and shame the culprits.” We agree. Although their manifesto specifically addresses the American Historical Association (AHA), their critique can be levied against the many humanities organizations and institutions that, like the AHA, emphasize career diversity and “unwittingly accede to the defunding of the humanities that has characterized U.S. academia for decades.” Indeed, the appropriation of an alt-ac rhetoric has mostly meant accepting “that tenure-track lines will not return and … accommodating this ‘reality.’” The authors continue: “Why not work to transform the austerity consciousness that has degraded academic work instead of merely accepting it? Grossman affirms ‘that the AHA does not have the power to restore’ a past in which tenure-track jobs were plentiful. But how will we know if we don’t even try?” Again, we agree. We ought to try, and try again, to save tenure by fighting administrification first and foremost, i.e. without reproducing the convenient Alt Ac versus tenure-track opposition through which the real “culprits” and beneficiaries are absolved of responsibility.

In other words, we are not here exactly mounting a critique of Alt Ac per se: students and unemployed PhDs should be lauded for their ingenuity at landing jobs outside the professoriate in our times of largely manufactured academic precarity. We aim to highlight instead the institutional rhetoric surrounding Alt Ac, the empty gestures through which the university or well-meaning colleagues appropriate the reality of Alt Ac as a natural extension of our educational offerings, which it is not. It is at best an anodyne, which risks obscuring a larger need for structural change, one that wouldn’t ask of students to find their own, individualized solution to problems caused by the budgetary misallocations of administrators. Rather than herald Alt Ac as the panacea it cannot be, let’s rethink it as a necessary but insufficient step toward such overhaul. There are better models of Alt Ac to embrace than one that merely consists of embracing it rhetorically.

Institutions of higher learning currently abrogate their responsibilities to their shareholders when they conveniently resort to Alt Ac as an outside, individualized, low-cost solution to the crisis they have themselves fabricated within their own walls.3 If there is to be an Alt Ac, it should be one that holds the university accountable from within, rather than one that projects onto an abstract, distal job market both the reasons and solutions for the impasses in which the profession finds itself. This is deeply ironic at a time when education is still branded as the predominant means of social elevation and class mobility.

In fact, the most ostentatious and vertiginous manifestation of class elevation via a humanities education is the one that consists of faculty ascending to positions of managerial power within the university. Ironically, these are often faculty who, as accomplished as they may be in their fields of scholarship, are untrained in administrative savoir faire or even in people management skills; this throws into question the meritocratic myth that grounds the social elevation paradigm (or American Dream). It follows, then, that this would be the same kind of inaptitude and arbitrariness they are now seeking to export into the nonacademic world through rhetorical endorsements of Alt Ac, which suggest hiring people untrained in a field to do the job of those trained in it. The relationship between faculty on the one hand and a disconnected higher administration on the other is not enhanced by any particular expertise or training on the part of the latter class, which—insofar as it neither teaches nor does research—goes on to lose sight of the core mission of the institution. In such a context, the new administrators’ endorsement of Alt Ac necessarily becomes about exporting into other professional realms the same kind of untutored and rather arbitrary career moves that have typified their own ascent through the administrative ranks of the academy.

In light of their increased distance from both teaching and scholarly enterprise, these administrative leaders eventually have more in common with the professional staff they increasingly rely upon, converse with, and overwhelmingly delegate to (since staff actually have the administrative skills administrators need), than with their own faculty, whose intellectual commitments require resources. Instead of promoting the sort of research and pedagogy that requires serious, extended intellectual inquiry, they primarily value and demand a productivity that can be measured in terms of matrix, algorithms, and tangible results that are both opposed to—and mostly opposed by—the work of the humanities. The defunding of the humanities is not incidental to this process; it is a necessary extension of it. When the humanities are put in a position to compete to justify their own existence in a circular model where administration has to justify theirs, scholarship is bound to lose ground and be devalued, since its benefits are mostly incommensurable.

No matter how bad or good the overall budgetary situation is at a state level, when salaries are funneled into managerial, high-paid posts, the consequence will always be fewer positions in the fields of teaching and research. Our own proposal for a more viable, less cooptive Alt Ac is therefore one that can only occur in the wings, while we wait for the profession to awaken to the crisis of administrification that is so directly and obviously affecting our ability to save tenure. The Alt Ac we are proposing would, however, at the very least reinstitute the lifeline mooring the university’s intellectual mission to its administrative and staff bodies and, as such, help move us toward a larger structural redress in the long haul.

The future of Alt Ac, if it is to have a future, lies with the universities themselves, not in outside industries whose interest in unemployed humanities PhDs is at best sporadic and at worst limited to the few usual suspects (NEH, American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS), a few private high schools, or organizations that have been somehow directly linked to or dependent on academia). Other employers are not exactly lining up to advertise alt-ac jobs on the MLA Job Information List (JIL) nor is there an MLA JIL for alt-ac jobs.4 In other words, whereas “alternative academic” or “Alt Ac” was originally about research or administrative positions in the public or private sectors inside and outside academia, today, in keeping with the deteriorating job market, it increasingly refers to the idea of a career beyond academe. Those are precisely the jobs outside the professoriate or its related industries which, in stark contrast to the expanding meaning of Alt Ac, are not readily or steadily available to our students. For any unemployed PhD who gets a job in Alt Ac, hundreds simply don’t. Alt-ac careers are an exception to the rule, the rule being that employers, whether they are academic or nonacademic, will always and quite understandably be more interested in people with training or a track record in the field in which they are hiring.

In the absence of statistical evidence for doing so, industrial and business concerns are not waiting with wide-open arms to hire our jobless PhD candidates, and the larger marketplace does not stand ready or able to free academia from its impasse. The less convenient truth is that the current job crisis is largely of our own making, so it is now up to us not just to propose a solution but to provide the material support needed to effect it. If we are going to continue admitting PhDs and seek to appease them and ourselves by encouraging them to consider Alt Ac, then we’d better put our money where our mouth is and help at the very least produce the kind of alternative jobs we recommend to our unemployed PhDs.5

Institutions of higher learning could show that they fully subscribe to their own rhetoric about the exemplary qualifications of humanities PhDs for various professional alternatives to tenure-track professorships. They could, for instance, be eager to install these unemployed students among their own ranks, in academic and non-academic positions: as laboratory managers, curators, curatorial assistants, clerical assistants, grant writers, fundraisers, IT specialists, business managers, program managers, software developers, administrative assistants, etc. Every major college or university has hundreds of alt-ac positions that could readily form a seedbed for a growth industry in new school PhD hiring. Each could explicitly recruit for these alt-ac jobs amongst their own students by circulating job descriptions amongst them and encouraging them to apply.

At the very least, soliciting recent humanities PhDs to apply for and staff alternative occupations within the universities would constitute a practical expression of faith in the alt-ac idea that these same institutions have been concerned to advocate. Beyond that, such a hiring policy would send a message of endorsement for these humanities PhDs to the non-academic job market: “We who know these candidates best know they are the best hires we could make.”

But no concerted effort has been made to formulate or execute such a policy, no such faith has been affirmed, no such endorsement registered, no such imprimatur given. Quite the opposite. While certain academic organizations, like the MLA and NeMLA, have been looking to boost the internal job prospects for PhD candidates exploring non-professorial careers, academic institutions themselves have maintained the same hiring criteria, more or less, that were operative before the academic job market crashed, when newly minted PhDs had reason to stay in their tenure-track lane.

There seems to be two possible reasons for the apparent reluctance of university hiring committees to recruit and consider their own PhDs for non-professorial appointments. One is that the skill set of the candidates does not match and cannot easily be adapted to the duties of the several positions advertised. If this rationale predominates, it amounts to nothing less than a tacit debunking of the alt-ac idea. If humanities PhDs cannot be seen to fulfill professional roles in the university, where they have spent the last 5-10 years familiarizing themselves with the institutional culture, where exactly would their training seem answerable? The second reason why university committees might be lukewarm toward hiring PhD or ABD applicants is the concern that these applicants will not remain in the job but will quit at the first opportunity to land the academic or teaching career for which they trained. This is a concern they would be sharing with all other alt-ac employers who have historically remained shy about hiring overqualified candidates for their open positions.

This reasonable concern likewise militates against the alt-ac project itself. It assumes that the PhD who accepts a professional staff position is indeed “settling.” Enacting this concern in turn discriminates against the PhD candidate for doing so, i.e. for assenting to exactly the sort of capitulation that the alt-ac project envisions and urges. If this rationale predominates, it speaks less to Alt Ac per se than to a flaw in university hiring policy. It should be kept in mind that the impermanence of these jobs is part and parcel of the professional life of the university (or professoriate life for that matter). Staff routinely get promoted across the institution, leave for better positions, and are replaced.

It is time for institutions of higher learning to stop fearing the departure of PhD applicants and start applauding these moves, as they do for other employees. Indeed, the quick turnover of staff that may or may not derive from PhDs in alt-ac positions should be viewed as an asset rather than a problem. Rather than fear a professionally mobile staff, we should turn positions into paragons of interchangeability. It is on us to make the tools and skills of various administrative and clerical positions well-articulated, spelled out, clear and available in writing, online, so that interchangeability becomes part and parcel of alt-ac careers within the university. PhDs leaving our own alt-ac positions for a teaching job would then be a sign of success that would make the institution shine rather than evidence of staff dissatisfaction or inadequacy. If the transition from one staff to PhD or PhD to staff or PhD to PhD is prepared carefully, with detailed instruction manuals, training videos, and clearly defined tasks, then it should never become an issue to change staff were the alt-ac hires to leave for a teaching and research job, and rotations would not ever become synonymous with inefficiency or decline.

Should our PhDs eventually use these positions as a stepping stone to the academic teaching job they had originally trained for, we would then be adducing proud statistics about how many PhDs rotated through our alt-ac positions, feeling supported through what they would otherwise have experienced as a period of “abandonment” or “unemployment.”6 It would allow unemployed PhDs not only to be employed while looking for an academic job, but to keep one foot in an institution of higher education while still being involved in departmental life. Some may even choose to call their first year on the job “administrative post-doc” to give it cachet. What is more, such a position would allow them to acquire the kind and degree of administrative knowledge that would greatly ease the search for professional jobs both outside and inside the academy. Imagine how good it would look and feel if we could say, “X helped as the assistant to the chair for three years before landing her dream job at …” and “she developed actual administrative skills that will be important to any future leadership role she may hold at your institution” or “we moved x students from alt-ac positions at our own institutions to permanent positions elsewhere in x industries” or “X thought this would be temporary but would never dream of doing anything else now … we are very lucky to have him/her as part of our professional staff.”7

Until institutions of higher learning work to redress the administrification that is redirecting funds away from the tenure-track faculty jobs they are replacing (either due to the Big Bloat or exponentially rising salaries within a smaller constituency), our claims that Alt Ac is a viable alternative for which we are surreptitiously training our students will remain hypocritical. In the meantime, hiring and training our own unemployed PhDs for administrative positions at the heart of our institutions of higher learning is key to making our commitment to Alt Ac meaningful. Preaching should always begin at home.8

If we are serious about offering or recommending Alt Ac to our PhDs, then it behooves us to do everything in our power to consider them equitably for our internal alt-ac positions. We increasingly seem to welcome in leadership and administrative positions people who are not trained in the versatile fields of the very humanities they go on to control and lead. Why do we not follow the same logic and make professional staff positions more attainable to those not necessarily trained in those fields? That would at the very least increase at the level of the staff the support for the core mission of the university in which our freshly minted PhDs necessarily believe.

Some of our colleagues who then went on to assume positions of leadership in the college once suggested that we ought to include one or two career-oriented, non-humanities courses as a requirement in the graduate curriculum to facilitate a Plan B approach to the job market for our PhDs. If those graduate students did not land a job in academia, then they could fall back on the alternative skills they acquired through those courses and be prepared for an alt-ac career. This response felt especially desperate and an extreme articulation of the whole alt-ac scheme: the idea that a humanist (who has been trained in pulling apart ideological, narrative, historical, textual, and cultural assumptions) would in any way be competitive in a field whose usual job applicants would have not one or two courses but years of training or apprenticeship was to us a symptom of the arrogance of a profession that is now eager to claim it has transcended its elitism. Read: we can learn to do in a fraction of the time what others take years to master and with a fraction of the training others need to specialize in their field—all while doing a PhD! Needless to say, this off-the-cuff suggestion may be well-meaning in the context of the humanities, but it is demeaning to other professions whose hard work and experience are often belittled by our passion to praise our kin and save our skin.

Claiming that our humanities students are well- or better-qualified for jobs in outside industries that have no interest in them and for which they did not train is not only a rhetorical appropriation of the resourcefulness of the individuals who made it in parallel tracks, but also a depreciation of those other career paths and educational trainings. Our profession’s elitism has a way of re-appearing through the back door even as we have convinced ourselves that our embrace of Alt Ac inoculates us against it. So maybe it is time to move away from an unthinking defensiveness when charges of elitism are levied against detractors of today’s pervasive alt-ac rhetoric toward a consideration of what actually grounds if not justifies the elitism with which we associate the humanities. If celebrating the humanities as the unique, necessary, interdisciplinary, alternative, and urgent enterprise that we believe it to be is elitist, then maybe it is not a defensive posture we should adopt but an assenting one.

But the bad faith, or at least the selective amnesia, at work in the institutional and rhetorical promotion of Alt Ac runs deeper still. For what we all know, though rarely confess, is that the critical thinking and analytical reasoning skills so often trumpeted as a humanities preserve are mainly inculcated and acquired at the undergraduate level, as the signature benefit of a humanities major. Such skills do not represent the fruit, but the assumed ground, of PhD matriculation, and moreover these skills are not so much enhanced or refined in the PhD program as applied in an increasingly focused and fine-grained manner. If the humanities major “trains” critical and analytical reflection in the sense of preparing and developing the necessary acumen, the PhD “trains” such reflection in the sense of directing and canalizing it. The implication of this division of intellectual labor can only serve to discredit the alt-ac agenda as currently promulgated. Precisely because we are right in promoting the humanities major as the gateway to the wide and variegated world of professional and business opportunity, we are wrong to encourage a 5- to 10-year pursuit of the PhD as, alternately, a path to like occupational possibilities. The humanities majors who go directly into the workforce spend their post-graduate years channeling their critical and analytical prowess along lines immediately relevant to the endeavor they have embarked upon; the PhD has spent the same time channeling their critical and analytic prowess along lines that are not just less pertinent, but less suitable to the same destination. In other words, although Alt Ac is often propounded as a humanities-affirmative project, its constituents find themselves at a distinct disadvantage to their less advanced humanities compatriots. We contend that the problem today is not an unwillingness to consider Alt Ac but a consistent projection of the solutions for our profession’s problems outward, onto a putative and amorphous job market, rather than on our own internal processes over which we actually have some significant sway. To argue that the post-2008 drastic cuts by state legislatures are somehow to be blamed for an infrastructure in which the exorbitant salaries of an administrative class that is somehow inexplicably growing in numbers in times of budget crisis (even as the faculty lines they are replacing are shrinking) is the epitome of bad faith. Clearly, if there is money to pay for managers and administrators whose exorbitant salaries are simply beyond the pale, then there is money for the multiple faculty who could replace them and therefore more positions for our unemployed PhDs.

We have argued that by relying on alt-ac rhetoric as a way of maintaining the relevance of the humanities to an increasingly skeptical (not to say anti-intellectual) public, we only succeed in taking credit away from the few extraordinary individuals who made it either big, or at all, in fields for which we did not train them. That is their accomplishment, not ours. We also undermine our own field’s importance, not as a steppingstone to nonacademic careers but as a steppingstone to humanities careers whose elite status should be earned, not assumed, not to mention to humanities careers that are yet to be created. And we shamelessly do so for the worst of reasons, namely to continue doing business as usual. Because let’s face it: all these alt-ac exhortations do not materially assist unemployed PhDs, who hardly need the university at large or their happily tenured advisor to tell them what they already knew: that in the absence of related types of jobs, they have the option of looking for another in the industry or elsewhere. “Oh my god, thank you, I had no clue I could do something else until you pointed it out to me,” said no PhD ever. And clearly, we cannot both take credit for the successes of the Steve Jobs of the world while refusing to recognize that unemployed PhDs have been serving as their own alt-ac career resources long before higher education thought of even formulating an alt-ac agenda.

The endorsement of Alt Ac at the university level shifts responsibility away from the institution for its budgetary and hiring decisions while making unemployed PhDs feel bad about having gone into the humanities in the first place. It is also bound to make graduate students feel guilty and unreasonable were they to persist in a failed job search. They may in turn be accused of elitism when they continue to hope or search for college positions in the current job market crisis. One can also already imagine the kind of divisions that would begin to compartmentalize the student body in graduate school were some students earmarked as Alt Ac versus research or teaching material.9

Offered as a solution to the current job crisis, and potentially as a marketing ploy advanced by those who more egregiously benefit from student enrollment, Alt Ac becomes a rhetorical con game. It does not matter how we spin statistics to praise the reasoned thinking and critical skills that ground our disciplines as the source of people’s success in Alt Ac, there is no reason why those who compete for these positions could not have acquired their thinking skills through other sources, courses, or venues. That we teach critical skills does not mean that these are exclusive to the humanities. These are not like programming codes one gets to learn. We can testify to having had engineering or business students who were better critics and essay writers than English majors. In other words, because the humanities are foundational to all disciplines, and therefore infuse learning at all levels and in all contexts, students benefit from its premises widely and diffusely, albeit not always quantifiably. And certainly, the graduate students in particular who go on to specialize in the humanities or any text-based studies do not have anything over and above other candidates who also benefited from a humanistic education in other ways.

We do not believe the humanities to be in crisis. The world, however, is. We are still fulfilling our role and producing at the top of our abilities, helping people think better; enjoy beauty and art; and produce other-directed, community-based, human-centered solutions. We are still a draw for students with the necessary passion, talent, and perseverance for the adventurous labor of sustained intellectual engagement. We can’t call the arts and humanities a nonviable career path in a society that spends all its free time consuming art, fiction, and nonfiction. These are not just glorified hobbies. What we need to do is generate jobs for our own when we can, alt-ac and certainly tenure-track, so we can continue the struggle against the ignorance, instrumentalism, and ideological complacency that is creating the current forms of disciplinary inequity, one which affects but need not enslave us. This campaign would include Alt Ac as an institutionally sponsored and funded layover to a solution but not as an institutionally ballyhooed and marketed solution in itself. It can only be conceived on our end as a temporary fix, a transition or prelude to a permanent job, the right one, whether the latter is the one our jobless students trained for or a job they took and didn’t expect to love as much as they did.

But it is not for us to say. It is for them. Our role is to make it possible for them to have a say.

Notes

1. Alt Ac or alt-ac is widely used to describe the idea of a career beyond academe as well as positions outside the professoriate but inside the university, such as grant writing and fundraising. See the MLA Report: “The profession must make a strong case to the public at large and especially to prospective employers that our doctoral programs prepare students for career paths throughout society, not only in higher education” (12). Or Lissette Lopez Szwydky, who proposes “diversifying faculty experience” by adding career education to their teaching and research responsibilities: “humanities departments need a professoriat composed of faculty members with diverse professional experiences who can actively mentor and train students for a range of careers. This work cannot be sidelined or relegated as service—it needs to occupy a central place in the curriculum and in the intellectual life of humanities departments.”

2. For instance, in “Redefining Success,” Matt Villeneuve argues that it is time to “discard the elitist conception of ‘placement’ and use more meritocratic language like hired; and recognize that when we say ‘the job market’ we really mean the faculty job market, and that historians actually find employment in many job markets.”

3. In Vimal Patel’s response to the MLA Report, Bennett Carpenter, then a PhD student in literature at Duke University, is quoted as saying, “In focusing on tweaks and ‘innovations’ rather than on labor conditions, the MLA task force … misses the point. Alt-ac will not save us. The digital humanities will not save us. Only a concerted effort to transform the labor conditions of higher education can resolve the current crisis.” We agree.

4. The 2019 MLA career fairs, as stated above, hosted about twelve predictable organizations, some of which attended on an informational basis only, rather than because they were actively recruiting candidates for open positions: MLA, Peace Corps, ACLS, Khan Academy, NYU Press, Academic Search, etc.

5. Needless to say, after eroding tenure, administrators are now going after the PhD, with schools shrinking and sometimes even canceling admissions.

6. For example, at Penn State, Christopher Long, a philosophy professor and associate dean started a graduate internship program that places PhD students in paid non-teaching, non-research internships in offices across the university. Brian Croxall, a recent Emory University PhD in English who now works as a digital humanities strategist in that school’s library, stated the obvious: “It’s much easier to get a job working in the Office of Undergraduate Admission if you’ve worked in that office—or an office—before” (Schuman).

7. The interchangeability would be a function of getting promoted to a better job in or outside one’s university, not a requirement. It is meant as an extension of, not a substitute for, the massive graduate student and contingent faculty mobilization for living wages and security that is ongoing today.

8. MLA, our central professional organization, showed us the way by slashing its Executive Director’s salary a few years back after the members’ outcry. We are particularly grateful to the individual leaders during whose tenure this transition took place, smoothly and willingly, all the more so since it affected them so directly.

9. We would in effect be instituting a higher-level version of the old class-based British educational system, which ticketed students early on for either vocational tracks leading to jobs or academic tracks leading to careers.

Works Cited

Berman, Jillian. “There are more people working at colleges, but they probably aren’t teaching.” MarketWatch, 6 Jan. 2017, www.marketwatch.com/story/there-are-more-people-working-at-colleges-but-they-probably-arent-teaching-2017-01-06. Accessed 29 Jan. 2021.

Bessner, Daniel, and Michael Brenes. “A Moral Stain on the Profession: As the humanities collapse, it’s time to name and shame the culprits.” The Chronicle of Higher Education, 26 April 2019, www.chronicle.com/article/a-moral-stain-on-the-profession/. Accessed 15 Feb. 2021.

Dutta, Monalee. “11 Corporate Leaders with Humanities Degree who are Busting all Notions about the Stream.” Univariety, 22 March 2021, https://www.univariety.com/blog/corporate-leaders-with-humanities-degree/. Accessed 20 January 2022.

Graeber, David. Bullshit Jobs: A Theory. Simon & Schuster, 2018.

MLA Task Force on Doctoral Study in Modern Language and Literature. Report of the MLA Task Force on Doctoral Study in Modern Language and Literature, May 2014, apps.mla.org/pdf/taskforcedocstudy2014.pdf. Accessed 1 March 2021.

National Endowment for the Humanities. “Press Release: NEH Announces New Next Generation Humanities PhD Grant Program.” National Endowments for the Humanities, 20 October 2015, https://www.neh.gov/news/press-release/2015-10-21. Accessed 20 January 2022.

Patel, Vimal. “MLA’s Effort to Reshape Ph.D. Misses Mark, Some Say.” The Chronicle of Higher Education, 4 June 2014, www.chronicle.com/article/mlas-effort-to-reshape-ph-d-misses-mark-some-say/. Accessed 19 Feb. 2021. 

Schuman, Rebecca. “‘Alt-Ac’ to the Rescue?” Slate, 18 Sept. 2014, slate.com/human-interest/2014/09/a-changing-view-of-alt-ac-jobs-in-which-ph-d-s-work-outside-of-academia.html. Accessed 20 Feb. 2021.

Szwydky, Lissette Lopez. “From Alt-Ac to Tenure-Track: The Need for Diversifying Faculty Experience.” Profession, 20 July 2020, profession.mla.org/from-alt-ac-to-tenure-track-the-need-for-diversifying-faculty-experience/. Accessed 20 Feb. 2021.

Terras, M., Priego, E., Liu, A., Rockwell, G., Sinclair, S., Hensler, C., and Thomas, L. “The Humanities Matter!” Infographic, 2013, 4humanities.org/infographic. Accessed 21 January 2022.

Villeneuve, Matt. “Redefining Success: Conversations about Career at AHA19.” Perspectives on History, 20 Feb. 2019, www.historians.org/publications-and-directories/perspectives-on-history/february-2019/redefining-success-conversations-about-career-at-aha19. Accessed 22 March 2021.