by Jon Lackman | 27 January 2009 | Career
For many attendees at the CAA conference late next month, the point is to find a job. And the outlook is “grim,” writes the Village Voice:
Never mind a hiring freeze. For those seeking jobs in academia, next year is looking more like a nuclear winter.
“Last year, about a quarter of the positions I applied for had their searches canceled, and last year’s market didn’t look as bad as this year’s,” says one aspirant, art historian Sandra Cheng. “I’m wondering how many of these positions I’m applying for are actually real.”
Now a visiting assistant professor at Pratt, Cheng got her Ph.D. in May at the University of Delaware and has a résumé filled with fellowships and grants. She’s seeking a traditional academic livelihood: research, travel, and teaching, at a university with tenure-track positions. But after a year of job-hunting and piecing together part-time positions, Cheng is wondering if the career she envisioned still exists.
“I do sense a permanent change,” she says. “I wonder if this is the last leg for the tenure system” …
[The] odds have Cheng reconsidering her career path. She’s thinking about detouring away from art history and going into academic administration—universities are businesses, and businesses always need managers to run them. But if she does stick with teaching, she’d like to land a school where she can concentrate on undergraduates. Cheng is queasy about the idea of encouraging future art historians along into a field unable to absorb them.
“For Ph.D.’s in the humanities market, it’s almost like we really shouldn’t make any more, because there’s such a backlog of doctorates floating around out there and we don’t have the jobs,” she says. “The programs want more grad students to keep their departments floating, but is it really ethical, I wonder?”
Regardless of Dutton’s insights, the notion that preliterate societies that have developed in isolation from the West “reflect those of our ancient ancestors” is an extremely old notion. Anthropologists like Taylor were talking about it a century ago (in fact it was the prevailing ideology within emergent anthropological discourse at the end of the 19th century). It is an idea which has been rigorously attacked and dismantled by scores of thinkers since then.