For the discipline of German Studies, most jobs require a
serious commitment to research. The notion that most faculty members find jobs
at teaching-focused universities is often repeated, but it does not apply to
German Studies. If you want to find a job in German Studies, or if you want to
prepare your grad students to find jobs, focusing on teaching at the expense of
research is a recipe for failure.
Before I provide the documentation, let’s unpack this a bit.
By “jobs” I mean “tenure-track jobs as a German professor,” because that is
what nearly all the students who pursue a Ph.D. hope to achieve (and if we
included non-tenure-track jobs in the following analysis, it wouldn’t change
the results in any significant way). I’m also focusing on universities in North
American because few people enter positions in international Germanistik with a Ph.D. from a North
American university. Our training in literature combined with experience in
foreign-language pedagogy make us strong candidates at home but flawed ones
abroad.
It has been obvious for several years, of course, that where
the jobs are is not in German
Studies, with the exception of around 30 positions each year. Academic
departments should respond by cutting back the size of incoming cohorts and the
number of degrees granted. They should recognize that many of their graduates
will find careers outside of academia as a necessity, and be supportive of those who do so. What they should not do, despite all the hype, is try to
prepare grad students for non-academic careers. A Ph.D. in German is a horribly
inefficient way to prepare for a career in finance or technology or the
non-profit sector or, really, almost anything except becoming a German
professor. Let the grad departments instead focus their efforts on preparing
their grad students to become the best-qualified candidates for the jobs that
exist. That’s what they are—or should be—good at.
So there aren’t a lot of jobs in German Studies. But if
you’re determined to give the academic job market in German a whirl, then you
need to be aware of where the jobs that exist actually are. If you’re a faculty
member in a Ph.D.-granting department, you need to know what kind of training
your students actually need, and what your neighbor in the office across the
hall says about her discipline may not be true at all of German Studies.
I’m basing the following on over 330 tenure-track or
open-rank jobs advertised in German Studies, either in the MLA/ADFL job list or
in other sources, from the 2006-2007 academic year through the 2013-2014 academic
year. I’m combining the pre-crash years of 2006 and 2007 with the post-crash
years of 2008 and later because the percentage differences were insignificant when I examined them separately. The crash appears to have affected the number of tenure-track jobs in all types
of departments.
Now it’s true that most tenure-track jobs are found in
departments that offer only a bachelor’s degree (53.7%), or only a minor (4.7%)
or language courses (2.1%), meaning 60.5% of jobs do not involve graduate
teaching. That still leaves a large fraction of jobs that do involve graduate teaching either at the
MA level (10.3%) or the Ph.D. level (29.2%). Call it a 60:40 split between jobs
that involve only undergraduate teaching and jobs that include some
graduate-level teaching.
The crucial context, however, is that 59% of all
tenure-track jobs are at research institutions (RU/VH, RU/H, or DRU in Carnegie
classifications). Faculty in bachelor’s-granting departments at research
institutions are required to publish in most cases, as your
colleagues at Notre Dame and Dartmouth can confirm. Another 17.1% of jobs are
found at master’s degree-granting institutions that may require research. The
bachelor’s-granting colleges—mostly SLACs—do offer 23.3% of jobs, but most of
them are still interested in faculty publishing (and including undergrads as
co-authors). The only institutions that almost never require research are
community colleges. Since 2006, there have been two tenure-track positions in
German advertised at this level (0.6%).
The other kind of position that requires no research,
available at all institutions of all types, is part-time adjunct teaching. Graduate
departments should be doing everything in their power to avoid sending their
students into that type of position.
It might help to classify the segments of the job market
both by degree granted and by institution type, and rank them by the portion of
the job market they comprise.
Figure 1: Percentage of tenure-track jobs in German Studies, 2006-2007 to 2013-2014, by the degree granted by the hiring department and simplified Carnegie classification of the hiring university
This is your future on German Studies if you are one of the
lucky ones that finds a stable job. Your grad program had better prepare you
for doing some serious research, or you won’t be a serious contender for the
biggest segment of the job market: Ph.D.-granting departments at research
institutions. Even if your department doesn’t offer graduate degrees, your
colleagues on the T&P committee from departments who do aren’t going to
grant you tenure if you aren’t publishing. You have to leave your grad program
specialized enough to succeed in your subfield. Tenure-track jobs that are focused solely or
predominately on teaching are rather uncommon in German Studies.
On the other hand, most faculty aren’t going to be able to
teach only in their subfield, even at research universities. You’ll have to
teach a combination of language, culture, and literature courses, usually not
in your subfield. Those annoying breadth requirements in your graduate
curriculum are there for a reason. So is your teaching methodology seminar.
Finally, be prepared to move. Here are the top ten states by
the number of tenure-track jobs advertised in German Studies since 2006,
comprising 50% of all jobs advertised. (I’m treating all of Canada as if it
were a single state. Uh, sorry?)
Another approach is to look not at states, but at regions
(again using the Carnegie classification, and treating Canada as its own
region).
Figure 3: Regional distribution of tenure-track jobs advertised in German Studies, 2006-2007 to 2013-2014
That’s right: Most jobs are in places that are hot, cold,
really freaking cold, really far away, or that usually vote Republican. Pursuing a job in
German Studies will mean moving there so you can teach undergraduate courses
outside your specialty while you’re under pressure to publish just as much as your colleagues in English who semi-regularly teach specialized seminars to grad students. For every job like that, fifty people will apply. For every one person who
gets a job like that, three or four others won’t get any job at all.
* * *
We’ll come back to this data again next time to answer the
question: Which grad programs need to cut back?
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