The Others

They’re coming to our discipline and taking away our jobs!

Well, not really. OK, maybe a little bit.

One of the exciting things about German Studies as a discipline is that we’re in conversation with historians, linguists, and scholars with many other disciplinary backgrounds. We talk to our neighbors down the hall in comparative literature and we maintain conversations with our colleagues in Germany.

One of the less exciting consequences is that the hiring pool for faculty in German Studies can be drawn very broadly. If there are 17 tenure-track jobs available this year, not all of the people hired will have Ph.D.s in German from North American doctoral programs. Some will hold doctorates from European universities, some will come from outside of German Studies, and some won’t hold a Ph.D. at all. Basically, think of the three alternate sources of German faculty as doctoral programs in Germany, comparative literature and other disciplines, and people with MA degrees. In the best case, this keeps our discipline vital. In the worst case, the dean can undercut any salary demand by simply offering a job to any native speaker he can find, qualified or not.

For the hiring cycles 2006/7-2015/16, a total of 91 searches selected candidates who did not hold doctorates from North American German programs (out of 814 total hires, or 11.2%). This was approximately equally split between tenure-track and non-tenure track positions (12.5% of all tenure-track hires and 10.2% of NTT hires).

In a few cases, no academic background can be determined. For tenure-track hires (42), just above half are from European doctoral programs, mostly from Germany, and just under half are from American doctoral programs, chiefly comparative literature. Only 2 of the TT hires were from the pool of MA holders, in both instances the rare case of TT hires by a community college. For NTT hires (41), around a third are MAs, a third are from other disciplines, and a third hold Ph.D.s from European programs. (The VAP numbers include 4 faculty members who were hired for multiple positions, while the TT numbers include a number of VAP-to-TT inside hires).

The largest single donor of faculty to German Studies is by far the program in comparative literature at the University of Pennsylvania (4 TT hires). Princeton comp lit and the Humboldt Universität each had 2 TT hires.

The North American programs that hire outside of North American German Studies most prolifically include Harvard, NYU, the University of British Columbia, and Notre Dame, all with two TT hires from outside North American doctoral programs in German. The outstanding champion in the field, however, is the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, with 3 system-external tenure-track hires (and 2 non-tenure-track hires) during the previous decade.

Finally, has there been any change in hiring over time? In a word, yes. From 2006/7 to 2015/16, the percentage of hires from outside North American German Studies for jobs in North American German Studies has risen from around 5% to around 20% of all hires, even as the number of tenure-track jobs in the field has declined profoundly—by around 70%—during the same time. That suggests an amazing commitment to interdisciplinary exchange and intellectual vitality for a discipline that can’t currently provide stable jobs for 75% of its own doctorates. Or maybe it suggests a lack of confidence in its own product and a desperate search for relevance.

Figure 1: Hires in North American German Studies of those not earning terminal degrees in German Studies or from North American doctoral programs, 2006/7-2015/16

2016-17

Unless something drastic happens - and it's almost May, so nothing drastic is going to happen - this year will mark a new absolute low in the number of tenure-track jobs in German Studies on the MLA job list: 17. That's two positions less than even 2009, the previous record for all-time miserable job markets. Of those 17 searches, one was canceled and converted into a NTT search.

Speaking of which: 2016-17 has been another banner year for non-tenure track jobs, with the number of ads near or at record levels all year. We're already at 39, with several more weeks still to go in a NTT hiring calendar that drags on into June and July. We'll likely end up in the range of such overheated NTT hiring years like 2005-2007, and beating the absolute record of 2014 is still a possibility.

So to recap: The economic recovery since 2008 has not led to a recovery in tenure-track hiring in German (or in any of the languages, actually). The job market in German is not going to make a comeback. There are, however, quite a few opportunities for you to stay in academia by moving every 1-3 years until you either strike out on the market or find yourself no longer geographically mobile (as long as you can live on $36-42,000 per year, including unreimbursed moving expenses).

Hiring season: how the market is changing, and how you can change the market

The MLA job information list opens one week from today. Usually the number of jobs advertised on opening day is a pretty good guide to how many TT jobs will eventually be advertized. Last year, though, my prediction was way off target: I predicted 16 or 17, but there were eventually 29 jobs advertised.

That’s not a positive development. It means the market is becoming less predictable, and specifically it means that more TT jobs are being advertised later in the year. For the most part, though, hiring departments still participate in the schedule of publishing job ads in the fall, conducting initial interviews in January, bringing candidates to campus and making initial offers in February and March. The more departments are competing for a job seeker at the same time, the better her life is. The general lack of departments competing for job seekers in German is a big reason for our misery.

But that’s only how things work in the shrinking pond of TT hiring. For several years now, the number of full-time NTT jobs has been larger than the number of TT jobs. Last year, there were over twice as many contingent positions on the German jobs wiki as TT positions, and even 50% more NTT than TT jobs posted to the MLA job list.

And the timing for NTT hiring works much differently. In the good old days of TT hiring – you know, 2006 – 75% of jobs were posted by the time the job list had been open for 4 weeks. Last year, it took until week 10 to reach that same level. For NTT jobs, though, barely 25% had appeared by week 10, and it wasn’t until week 30 – some time in April – that 75% of the jobs were posted.

That means that someone applying for TT jobs will know with a high likelihood in January or February how many schools are competing for his services. (Don’t kid yourself. Usually the answer is zero.) He can make an informed decision about what to do next – to accept a TT offer, to apply for NTT jobs, to go get a real estate license, whatever.

But there is no rhyme or reason to the hiring calendar of the NTT job market that is coming to dominate our short-lived careers. A great NTT job – teaching 3-3, paying $53,000, renewable indefinitely – can be advertised at any point in the year. A lousy NTT job – a one-year position teaching 4-4 for $32,000 – can also be advertised at any point in the year. And you often won’t know which job is which until it’s been offered to you.

There are two things that you – yes, you, the person reading this – can do to nudge the scales slightly more in favor of the job applicants. The job market in German will still be a desolate hellscape, but the thermometer setting may come down a bit.

1. Post the salary information of every job advertised to the job wiki. Make departments compete on salary. A few universities publish a pay scale in the job ad or in the HR job description. At public universities, the salary (or the salary of recently-hired people in similar positions in the department) is public information that can often be discovered with a little digging. At private universities, former tenants of the advertised position will know approximately what the salary is. Put the burden on the search committee to make sure the salary published on the jobs wiki is reasonably accurate. If the salary is too low, few people will apply. If nothing else, this will let would-be grad students see how dismal the salaries are in their dream jobs, provide ammunition to people who think they’re not being paid market wages, and maybe even shame a few departments into paying their full-time faculty a decent wage.

Enough with being coy about money. Applicants reveal every detail of their professional lives on their CVs. It’s about time that departments make public the basic information about the jobs they’re trying to fill.

2. Stay on the market. Let’s say you strike out on the TT market, but in February you land a one-year replacement position with College A teaching 4-4 that pays $37,000. Then in May you see a 3-year position at University B with a 3-3 teaching in a more attractive part of the country for you, and it pays $46,000. What should you do?

Apply. Take the interview. Take the job at University B when it’s offered.

Some senior academics will screech that This is Disgraceful, it is Simply Not Done, you have Given Your Solemn Word, Your Reputation in the Field Will Be Ruined, and you have Committed a Crime with Legal Penalties.

Nonsense. Look out for yourself, because no one else will. You owe College B nothing. They haven’t paid you a cent, and won’t until mid-September. College B can pick up the phone and find some other sucker in 15 minutes. Oh, the dean at College B won’t approve another hire, so College B can’t teach their intro classes? Very sad, but the insane policies at College B are not your problem. You can’t let that stop you from getting a better shot at a sustainable career at University A.

Will your reputation be ruined? Only at College B. Your friends and your advisor’s friends won’t care. They won’t remember you as “the gal who screwed over College B.” They’ll remember you as “that rising star who picked up that awesome job at University A.”

But can’t College B sue you? Since I’m not a lawyer, let me ask: what would they sue you for? It’s just a job offer. They’ve done nothing for you. Maybe in some alternate universe you would have to return your signing bonus. In the real world, people and businesses back out of contracts all the time. It’s just part of doing business, not a crime against humanity. And what college is going to want to have its name splashed across InsideHigherEd.com or Slate for suing an impoverished humanities Ph.D. who wanted to take a better job? It's not going to happen. If you’re still concerned, go give an employment lawyer $200 and ask him yourself.

(If you’re still working in your grad department, you may want to talk things over with your advisor. You’ll need to keep your advisor for a few more years yet, and maybe your advisor is one of those senior academics. But if you’ve left the nest, your advisor barely remembers you exist. Let your advisor know where you ultimately end up once you move in August. At the most, she’ll ask, “But I thought I heard you took a job at Slowpoke State?” To which you reply, “Oh, didn’t you hear? I got a better offer at Bigtime University, so I decided to accept their offer instead.” And that will be that.)

This is how we can make the job market suck a little bit less. Use your well-honed research skills to create transparency about salaries. And keep applying for the best job you can get. Don’t rush into the first NTT job you’re offered just because someone lowballs you in February.

2014-15 a Record-Breaking Year for Exit-Level Jobs

A boom in non-tenure track jobs promises full pre-unemployment for new Ph.D.s in German Studies

With the appearance today of an ad for a full-time adjunct instructor at the College of Charleston in the MLA job information list, the discipline of German Studies is rewriting its records for non-tenure-track hiring. Charleston’s ad pushes the total to 46 NTT jobs advertised so far—with five weeks left before the JIL closes—breaking the previous record of 45 NTT jobs set in 2005, and surpassing every prior year in nearly a half century since the first MLA job list appeared in 1966 (see graph). Never before have so many hopeful Ph.D.s in Germanistik been able to look forward to extending their professional identities and academic careers for nine more months before their cutting-edge research agendas become obscure footnotes in the MLA bibliography.

2014 sets an NTT record: German tenure-track and non-tenure-track jobs advertised in the MLA job information list, 1966-2014

While the number of new Ph.D.s granted during the 2014-15 academic year is not yet known, it is likely close to the 70 Ph.D.s awarded the previous year. That may suggest poor odds for new Ph.D.s seeking their first and last academic job, but the official numbers represent only a fraction of the market. With Charleston’s announcement, the German jobs wiki, which includes several jobs not advertised in the JIL, hit 70 advertised positions. Added to the 30 advertised tenure-track positions (at 29 TT positions in the JIL, 2014-15 is the 45th best year for TT job ads out of the 49 years since 1966), department heads are starting to worry that American colleges and universities may be facing an impending shortage of new Ph.D.s who are willing to shoulder high teaching loads for low pay for a couple years before their dreams of academic careers are snuffed out forever.

Long-standing traditions at many colleges of hiring new Ph.D.s as visiting assistant professors each year to put a young, research-active face on departments whose last TT hire was during the Nixon administration are in doubt. Departments who weren’t able to advertise their VAP slots until the late spring are facing several unpalatable options: hiring ABDs, canceling classes, or even canceling sabbaticals. Thus far, few departments have taken the drastic step of hiring stale Ph.D.s, or “experienced teachers with distinguished publishing records,” as they are euphemistically known, as it would be a tacit admission that a department’s teaching methods and research portfolio were stuck in 2013, or even earlier.

One group of faculty, though, is reacting to the latest figures with a mixture of relief and self-congratulation: Ph.D. advisors. Many of them will be able to pat themselves on the back this year for having placed all of their recent Ph.D.s in full-time academic jobs (what happens to the ungrateful little snots after that first job is their own problem). With such clear evidence that the jobs-with-training-wheels crisis in the humanities is receding, graduate faculty are looking forward to admitting larger graduate cohorts again so that no undergraduate German program in need of throwaway faculty members will be left wanting.

Slow years and job predictions: a graduate seminar in advanced straw-clutching

Today is the sixth week of the 2014-15 job market in German Studies. Some new jobs have appeared. Based on the new data, should I revise the number of jobs to be expected? Maybe.

To review: My previous estimate of the number of TT jobs to appear this year was 16, based on 9 TT jobs on opening day * 1.75. The basis for this was in history. The assumption is that a similar number of departments have their acts together enough to get a job ad into the opening JIL, and that's generally true. Since 2003, an average of 57% of all TT jobs have appeared on opening day, so 9 / .57 yields 15.8 jobs. Grim.

But wait! Now we have more data to go on. As of today, we're at 17 TT jobs, already ahead of the projection. Are more jobs coming? Since 2005, an average of 81% of all TT jobs have been advertised by week 6, so 17 / .81 yields 21 jobs. That's four more jobs, but still grim.

But wait! Maybe it's a slow year and lots more jobs are on the way!

No. No charge of the MLA job list stampeding in over the horizon is going to save you.

It's possible, however, that there has been an increase in the number of universities and departments whose  budget situation is so screwed up that they can't get a job posted by Halloween. And in fact there's some evidence for this. Between 2005 and 2008 - "the good old days, except we thought 2008 was just a down year and not the new dismal" - an average of 58% of TT jobs were posted on the first day, and 87% by week 6. Since then, it's been 51% on the first day, and 77% by week 6. If we use the more more recent averages from the dismal years since 2009 - the years most like 2014, in other words - we would project 18-22 jobs (using the first day/week 6 averages, respectively).

Which one is more accurate? Since 2009, the first-day projection as proved to be more accurate twice (in 2009 and 2011), while the week 6 projection has proved to be more accurate twice (in 2010 and 2013); they were tied (and dead-on accurate) in 2012. Taking the more recent years as a guide would suggest that the week 6 projection might be more accurate for this year: 22 jobs. Another way to look at it is that the lower projection was more accurate in 2005-2008, while the higher project proved more accurate in 2009-2013, again suggesting that the higher projection will be more accurate this year.

So I'm revising the projection upward by 6 jobs from 16 to 22. There might just be 5 more TT jobs out there waiting to be advertised. There's historical precedent for this: Since 2009, an average of 6.2 TT jobs have appeared on the JIL after week 6. The rule of thumb for next year might even become the number of TT jobs on opening day times two.

In other news, the number of non-TT jobs now advertised (11) is tied with 2005 and 2007 for the highest at this point in the last decade. Yay?

The jobpocalypse of 2014

On the opening day of the 2014-15 MLA/ADFL job information list for German, there were a total of nine ads for tenure-track (9) or open-rank (0) jobs. This is a new record for the least number of TT jobs advertised on opening day, beating out such lackluster years as 2009 (11), 2010 (11), 2013 (14), and 2012 (15).

Between 2003 and 2013, an average of 57% of all TT jobs that would appear on the ADFL job list appeared on opening day. The average for 2008-2013, at 52%, is little different.

Based on those numbers, we can expect a total of 16 or 17 TT jobs to be advertised in the JIL by the end of AY 2014-15. The last TT job ad may not appear until February or March, or even later.

If the predicted total of 17 jobs appearing in the MLA/ADFL job information list holds, 2014 will be the worst year on the job market for German in generations, somewhat worse even than 2009 and a level not seen since 1955, when "Personalia" recorded a total of 11 new tenure-track appointments. Your advisor, your advisor's advisor, and perhaps your advisor's advisors' advisor never saw a job market this bad.

From 2006-2013, an average of 90% of all positions were advertised in the JIL. We might therefore expect one or two additional TT jobs to be advertised outside of the JIL.

There were also four non-TT jobs advertised, but there is no way to predict the number of ads that will eventually appear, as they tend to show up at a steady but irregular rate through the summer.

How the job market in German really works. Part three (b): VAP Purgatory

Within the next few weeks, the streams will cross—for the fourth time in the last five years, the number of non-tenure-track jobs in German advertised in the MLA Job Information List will surpass the number of tenure-track jobs. The number of non-TT jobs on the wiki is already higher. Will being hired into one of those positions give you the inside track to a tenure-track position? Does the experience gained in a full-time temporary academic position make you a stronger candidate for tenure-track positions?

The short answer appears to be no. The slightly longer answer is that it may make you a more compelling applicant next year than you would be if you didn’t have a VAP position, so accepting the VAP position may raise your chances of landing a TT job compared to not accepting it, but it won’t make you much stronger as a candidate than you are right now. Or to put it into concrete terms, let’s say that you just defended your dissertation and applied for TT jobs in German Studies last fall. You had some interviews, but none of them resulted in an offer. Now you’ve been offered a VAP position. Should you take it? If you take it, you’ll probably do about as well on the job market when you apply in the fall as you did this last year; if you don’t take it, you’ll probably do worse. A VAP position will keep your qualifications current, but it won’t make you a stronger applicant than next year’s crop of new Ph.D.s. In our profession, experience only makes you as good as a fresh Ph.D., not better.

There are a few ways we can measure the effect of holding a VAP position. One way is to start with all the Ph.D.s from a range of years, in this case the 257 people who earned Ph.D.s in German between 2007 and 2010. Of those, 121 (or 47%) were hired into nationally advertised jobs of some sort by 2013. Of that number, 78 (or 30%) were hired into nationally-advertised tenure-track positions at least once; 64 (or 25%, including some of who were later hired into TT jobs and therefore also included in the previous figure) were hired into nationally-advertised non-tenure-track jobs at least once (in two cases, as many as four times) without having previously held a tenure-track job. Of the 64 who were first hired into NTT positions, 21 (33%) were later hired into tenure-track positions, 6 of them as the inside candidates at the school where they already held VAP positions.) So those hired into VAP positions through a nationally advertised search have a later rate of hire into TT positions little better than the entire group of Ph.D. earners. The former VAPs hired were on average around one year farther out from degree completion at the time of hire than the total group, however.

Another way to look at it is to compare people holding VAPs at a given time with the outcomes of new Ph.D.s who are facing the same years on the job market as the more experienced VAP holders. Let’s start with the people who were hired into nationally-advertised VAP positions that were advertised in 2008-9, 2009-10, or 2010-11, all post-crash job market years. Of the 89 individuals who were hired and who completed their Ph.D.s between 2000 and the present, 23 (or 26%) have subsequently been hired into TT positions to date.  As there have been three complete TT job cycles since then (2011, 2012, 2013), that figure is unlikely to change significantly. Notably, 7 of the 23 were hired into TT positions at the same school that had hired them initially. Of the original 89, therefore, 8% were hired as inside candidates, while 18% found TT jobs at other schools. The rest have not yet found TT employment through competitive national searches (although some may have been hired onto the TT as spousal hires or other non-competitive processes). Of the 23 hired following VAP experience, 6 were hired into Ph.D.-granting departments, none as inside candidates.

We can compare the outcomes for those 89 individuals with the outcomes of the (partially overlapping) 245 individuals earning PhDs in 2009, 2010, and 2011, who have had access to approximately the same TT job cycles as VAPs hired in the 2008-10 job cycles. Of those 245, 52 (21%) have been hired into nationally-advertised tenure-track positions by now. Considering that 2011 is the latest degree date under consideration, that figure is unlikely to change significantly.

So again, the likelihood of being hired onto the tenure track is not substantially higher for those who are hired into VAP positions through a competitive search process than it is for the overall population of those earning Ph.D.s in German studies. This is surprising, and not just because it runs counter to the assumption that professional experience makes one a stronger job applicant. The larger group includes Ph.D. holders who did not actively seek academic employment or made only a token effort to do so, while the smaller group of VAP holders by definition includes only those who actively sought academic jobs. (The size of the group that doesn’t seek academic employment after earning a Ph.D. is not known, but it may be large enough to explain the difference in TT hiring by itself. Around 5% of new grad students aren’t sure they want to be professors, and faculty jobs are listed as the top future career by only 75% of new grad students; see Fig. 12-13 over at the blog of the MLA Office for Research.) So the small difference (26% vs. 21%) between outcomes for the two groups again suggests that VAP experience is not an overriding factor when TT search committees are evaluating candidates.

Another strong possibility is that the post-Ph.D. teaching profiles may not look all that different for those who were hired as VAPs and those who weren’t. It is possible that many or most of the non-VAPs did have some non-TT teaching experience through the large number of unadvertised non-TT positions, whether adjunct or full time. (The large segment of unadvertised non-TT positions makes it all but impossible to determine the non-TT teaching experience of TT hires, or to establish a sample composed only of those without any non-TT experience.) Since job titles are not standardized between universities, it may be impossible to tell the difference between a part-time lecturer who picks up a few courses each semester and a full-time visiting faculty member with the same title who was hired into a highly competitive non-TT job that comes with benefits, a respectable salary, an office, and a 2-2 teaching load. Search committees evaluating these two applicants may not see any difference between their CVs.

So it appears that holding a VAP position (and, presumably, adding additional items to one's publication list) only keeps a candidate’s credentials current so that he or she remains a viable candidate, but with little or no advantage over applicants who have not had such positions. As a qualification for TT employment, part-time or unadvertised non-TT teaching may be the equivalent of being hired into a VAP position, or perhaps it does not matter at all. Rather than seeing a VAP position as the first step towards an academic career, applicants should see it as only providing what is in the contract: one or two years of full-time participation in the profession of German Studies, with job market prospects at the end that are, for better or worse, close to those of a new Ph.D.

How the job market in German really works. Part three: The dirty secrets of NTT hiring

What’s wrong with these pictures?


Figure 1: MLA/ADFL advertised TT and NTT positions in German, 1975-2012

This graph shows the number of tenure-track (green line) and non-tenure-track positions (blue line) in German advertised in the MLA/ADFL Job Information List for the last 38 years. (As with the TT ads, the NTT positions are only counted if they are full-time, full-year positions asking specifically for German and only German; “either German or Spanish” and “both German and Spanish”-type positions aren’t counted). In three of the last four years, the number of NTT jobs advertised has been above the number of TT jobs. In fact, in the middle of the third-worst year for TT hiring since at least 1957, we experienced our fourth-best year for NTT hiring. The situation is even worse than this graph indicates, as 90% of all the TT jobs that appeared on the wiki since 2006 were published in the JIL, but only 72% of the NTT jobs; the graph understates the total number of NTT jobs much more than we’re understating the TT jobs.

This illustrates an important but little-noticed way that academic careers are being undermined: rather than just in the initial phase, uncertainty, a lack of professional autonomy, and the impossibility of promotion now characterize the entirety of many academic careers. If you care about research or teaching in German Studies, or about preventing the spread of working conditions usually associated with the fast food industry, this is a bad thing.

Figure 2: ADFL advertised NTT positions vs. “Personalia” placements, 1975-2012

This next graph compares the number of JIL NTT ads (blue line again) and the subsequent new NTT appointments (green line) recorded in the “Personalia” section of Monatshefte. Unlike tenure-track hiring, where the number of ads closely tracks the number of new appointments, the numbers of NTT ads and NTT hires have almost no relationship with each other. Worse yet, there are far more new appointments than job ads.

Why is this a problem? Because that means that for decades, NTT hiring has been indifferently recorded. No one knows what’s being counted as an NTT appointment: part time? long-term lecturer? everything in between? At the same time, NTT jobs have long comprised the largest segment of annual hiring in German. Since 2000, there have been on average 90% more new NTT than TT appointments in “Personalia” each year. The job market and the working conditions that matter to most Germanists being hired today are not those associated with tenure-track appointments, because that is not where the majority are being hired. Worst of all, most NTT hiring is not advertised or based on a national search: since 1975, the number of new NTT appointments has surpassed the number of job ads by 57% on average. Not only are TT jobs disappearing, but the majority of the hiring for the remaining NTT jobs takes place out of sight of the MLA or any other professional institution.

If you’re interested in the prehistory, the chart back to 1957 looks like this:

Figure 3: MLA/ADFL advertised NTT positions in German vs. “Personalia” placements, 1957-2012

NTT appointments peaked and started declining in 1963, nearly disappearing by 1971. These instructor-rank appointments typically required only an MA and were often convertible to TT assistant professor appointments upon earning a Ph.D. (The last list of promotions to assistant professor appeared in “Personalia” in 1979.) Beginning in the early 1970s, the advertised NTT jobs morphed into a much different beast: temporary positions that came with an expiration date. From 2006 to 2012 (the latest complete job list), only 26% of the NTT positions were renewable appointments; the rest were limited to either one year (43%) or a few years at most (31%).

Who benefits from this system where TT jobs are scarce, but NTT jobs are relatively plentiful?

• The employers. Universities can hire qualified Ph.D. holders for full-time positions and boast about it in rankings and promotional materials (we have full time faculty with terminal degrees!), but never have to worry about giving their language instructors a raise or paying their pensions. The risks of enrollment volatility can be entirely offloaded from the university onto the NTT faculty members. Just hire and fire as often as necessary. Teaching and research awards, not to mention more expensive enticements like travel funding, research leaves, or sabbaticals, can be restricted to the shrinking cadre of tenure-track faculty.
• The Ph.D. programs. Your grad program can claim with a straight face that every one of their Ph.D.s who went on the market found a full-time academic teaching job upon graduation. (What happens to you after your first job is your own problem, not the department’s, in this view.)
• The research mill. As a NTT faculty member, your only chance to stay employed longer than 10 months is to keep your CV fresh, so you publish at break-neck pace so that you’ll have new publications to show the next search committee who will look at your applications.
• You. You showed the world that you’re good enough after all. You got a real job in your field that pays over twice as much your grad student stipend!

Who loses out?

• The students. In a term appointment, your incentives are not aligned with your department’s or your university’s, because they are not going to hire you the next time you need a job. By necessity, you focus on the things that will get you your next job. You don’t develop a course that the students may need, because a) you likely have no say in course development, and b) you have no idea if you’ll be there next fall. You may have already emptied your office by the time your spring-semester teaching evaluations come in.
• Your colleagues. Administrative responsibilities become more concentrated on the few remaining tenure-track faculty. Departmental democracies become tenure-based oligarchies or pedagogical dictatorships. With all their administrative demands, the tenure-track faculty have less time for research or teaching. Research and teaching instead become the domain of transient instructors, while tenure becomes increasingly restricted to a managerial administrative class.
• Research in German Studies. Even as you’re madly researching and publishing on a ten-month contract, you know what you don’t do? You don’t make a five- or ten-year plan, because everything you do must be completed by the end of the academic year. The important contributions to our field will not be made by people who can only plan ten months ahead at most.
• You. While you’re teaching as much, or 50% more, or twice as much as your TT colleagues, and publishing just as much (not because it’s in your contract, but because you need to in order to find your next job), you will be earning significantly less than you would have as a beginning assistant professor (and maybe receiving no employer’s match on your retirement contributions), all while enjoying less research support and being ineligible for the teaching rewards that would help your CV. Instead of the job market as a one-time life event that lasts four to six months, the job market will become your life, all year, every year. Instead of leaving academia after earning a Ph.D. because you couldn’t find a job, you’ll leave several years later, after you’ve discovered that you actually enjoy and are good at teaching and research, so much so that you’d do almost anything not to leave the field. If you pour your heart into building up a program, you will only prove to administrators that they don’t need to offer tenure to keep their programs running. You will never buy a home. You can choose between having no spouse, living apart from your spouse, or imposing a 100% portable career on your spouse. You can choose between having no children, or having children who will never spend longer than three years in any one place—children that you may not see much in any case while you’re teaching 4-4 or more, and publishing madly to keep your CV fresh, and applying for every job that will keep your career going for one more year. You will receive less moving support than TT faculty or none at all, even as you move across the country every other summer.

(What’s the rationale for giving NTT faculty a smaller reimbursement for moving expenses, anyway? People justify paying smaller salaries because adjuncts and NTT faculty merely teach, while TT contracts call for research and service, but since when does it cost NTT faculty less to move across the country? If a university claims to treat its NTT faculty well, but provides less for their moving expenses than TT faculty, it’s lying to itself.)

The systematic reliance on contingent faculty might be in some way defensible if the additional years of experience earned by VAPs made them more competitive candidates for tenure-track positions. But they don’t. Teaching experience and publications are good, but not as good as “promise” (which is to say, pedigree, freshness, and an aura of unblemished success). Every year of full-time professional experience gained as a VAP is before long outweighed by the stench that comes from failure to get a TT job. No amount of publishing and teaching makes up for the lack of a TT position when top departments evaluate the applications of candidates who have been out for a few years or more.

* * *

The department head just called. She reports that the search committee members were impressed by your credentials and your answers to their interview questions, and you are their unanimous choice for the position of Visiting Assistant Professor. The salary’s a bit on the low side, sorry, but it comes with full benefits.* No chance of renewal, unfortunately, as Professor Grossperücke returns from sabbatical in a year.
*Actually, the university won’t start contributing to your retirement until the second year of employment, and the position is limited to one year.

Do you accept the position? Maybe you do. This is what you’ve spent over a decade training for, ever since you declared a German major as an undergrad. It’s certainly easier to say yes to an adult salary than to choose unemployment and a career change you want to avoid—all of which might come soon enough anyway, so why rush? So you say yes.

Congratulations. You have bought yourself 10 months of an academic career, and one more spin of the wheel known as the academic job market. Better get to work. You don’t have much time. The next job list will come out before your new 101 students take their first chapter test.

How the job market in German really works. Part one: the eerie silence of mid December

(I first published this post on  Pan Kisses Kafka.)

Attention, ABDs and new Ph.D.s: If this is your first time on the market, the first year you’ve watched the weekly job list updates as if your life depended on them, you may be starting to freak out right about now. After the big bang of September, new jobs have been trickling out of MLA headquarters and raising your hopes like clockwork. But last week, not so much. Or this week. Next week won’t be any better.

Are you doomed? Yes, you’re doomed. Your advisor says that it’s still early in the year, and that more jobs will be advertised in the spring. She’s wrong. There will be maybe one new tenure-track job advertised between now and next July. I’m sorry to be the bearer of bad news.

Are you doomed? No, you’re not doomed. The visiting and non-tenure-track positions have barely begun to be advertised. They will trickle out intermittently for the rest of the year. Eventually dozens of them will be advertised, and you stand a decent chance of landing one.

How can I make these predictions with so much confidence? The answer is: data. This is the way the job market in German always works. See this graph:

Figure 1: Cumulative advertised TT jobs in German in weeks since initial MLA job list, 2005-today

This shows you the weekly count of how many tenure-track assistant-professor or open-rank jobs have been advertised from the opening MLA/ADFL job list up to the current week for every year since 2005. It only includes real jobs in German that new Ph.D.s can apply for, not the “Director of Theater History Center” or ultra-competitive humanities postdocs or Ivy League glam adjunct positions that get spammed to every discipline in the JIL, or the jobs for people who can teach two or more languages. (We’re also ignoring canceled or failed searches.) No matter how many TT jobs are advertised in any given year, they always show up the same way: a bunch on the first day, some more after that, a few even later, and almost none after the first 15 or 20 weeks have passed. If your dream job has not yet been advertised, it is not going to show up now. Sorry. Somebody had to tell you.

In fact, the market is so regular that you can accurately predict how many TT jobs will appear over the course of the year based only on how many are advertised on the first day. If we look at the last ten years and compare how many TT jobs show up on Day 1 with how many are advertised by the time the list closes in July, the average is 57%. Only three years in the last ten have been more than a few percentage points off: back in 2003/2004, the average hit 65/68%, while in 2010, it dipped down to 44%. Otherwise, it’s kept close to 57%. The last two years have been right on target.

Year	initial asst/open rank	%total a/o-r	projected	actual total
2003	33	0.65	58	51
2004	32	0.68	56	47
2005	29	0.58	51	50
2006	38	0.59	66	64
2007	34	0.59	59	58
2008	23	0.56	40	41
2009	10	0.53	17	19
2010	11	0.44	19	25
2011	22	0.55	38	40
2012	15	0.56	26	27
2013	14		24

Table 1: Initially advertised, projected, and actual total tenure-track jobs in German

So, let’s do the kind of math you last worried about when you took the GRE. How many TT positions were advertised on opening day this year? 14. One-four. Divide 14 by .57, and the result is twenty-four and one-half jobs. How many have been advertised on the JIL by now? 26. We’re already past the expected number. Good news is not coming in January. (You might notice that the number of total jobs is pathetic and not exactly rising. We’ll get to that soon.)

But wait! you say. There are more jobs than that on the wiki. What about them? Can you ignore the bad news because I’m not even counting all the other jobs that make it to the wiki?

No. I know about those jobs, too. I’m only counting jobs that meet a consistent definition so that I can make valid comparisons between years. For the last seven years, 90% of all TT jobs that show up on the wiki are advertised in the JIL. If you want, you can multiply the numbers above by 1.11 to take non-JIL jobs into account. Fourteen divided by .57 multiplied by 1.11 is 27.3. There are currently 27 TT jobs listed on the jobs wiki. In other words, 1.11 times zero is zero. There is not a new crop of TT jobs right around the corner in January. Maybe one, or two at most, maybe zero.

Don’t believe me? Look back at Figure 1. Notice where we are today in week 14. Look at other years. How many TT jobs have shown up later than this? Year in, year out, the answer is: maybe one.

So, 26 total jobs. How many new Ph.D.s are granted in North America every year? Three or four times that number (104 in 2011, according to the most recent “Personalia” article in Monatshefte). How many Ph.D.s come out of German universities? How many native speakers with no background in the discipline at all are department heads willing to put in front of a classroom of unsuspecting students if the price is right? You see the problem.

Are you doomed? No, of course not. The VAPs, they are a-coming. Take a look at the next graph, which shows one-year, renewable, and long-term non-TT jobs in German—and only German, not “German and/or Spanish,” and not counting “spring term only” positions—advertised in the JIL for the last several years. The graph looks way different. Every year, 25-45 non-TT jobs are advertised, and they trickle out at a steady rate throughout the year. (Note also the distinct slowdown in weeks 12-18, that is, right around now, which explains the disconcerting inactivity you may be noting when you check the weekly updates.) There will still be jobs advertised in the JIL in May or June, and even more advertised elsewhere (at least 30%, and maybe significantly more, of the VAP jobs that make it to the wiki are not advertised in the MLA JIL).

Figure 2: Cumulative advertised non-TT jobs in German in weeks since initial MLA list opening, 2005-today
So don’t despair, even as your ugly stepsisters friends fly off to MLA interviews in Chicago, leaving you in the dust. Don’t give up, even when your one telephone interview turns into a quick rejection (by wiki, not by actual contact from the SC). As January and February turn into March, April, May, or June, more and more applicants will leave the market, a few through landing a job, and more through revulsion at the conditions of the remaining jobs. If you are willing to teach 4-4 at a notoriously dysfunctional college in the backwater region of a chronically depressed state for $35,000 for one year with no chance of renewal, there may only be four other people applying, and three of them are local social studies teachers looking for a new career. (Sadly, this is mostly based on an actual recent job search.) If you’ve got a Ph.D. in German and some teaching experience, and aren’t fleeing any warrants, you have a decently good chance of landing a full-time job in your field for the next academic year (and search committees sometimes compromise on all those requirements, including the lack of a warrant for your arrest).

It will be your lucky break. Your once-in-a-lifetime chance to break into the profession. Your chance to show that you can so teach four new preps while pumping out a couple quick publications while networking at conferences. Maybe they failed to see the point of your dissertation, but this time everyone will have to admit what a gifted scholar and teacher you are, and they will rush to offer you a tenure-track position next year, when the market finally recovers.

Actually, none of that is going to happen. At most, you’ll land another visiting position, and you can start the charade all over again. You’re doomed.