Report: DDGC Town Hall on Job Market Crisis

Friday, September 25, 2020, 3:30-5:00pm (Pacific)

Event Moderators: Emily Frazier-Rath, Gizem Arslan, Andrea Bryant, Sean Toland. Event Organizers: Didem Uca, Priscilla Layne, Beverly Weber, and Ervin Malakaj. Summary by David Gramling and Andrea Bryant.

Attendees: 50 people in US and Canadian German Studies and related fields (15 doctoral students, 4 recent doctoral graduates without employment, 8 contingent or non-tenure track, 9 tenure track, 9 tenured, 5 unspecified)
 
Experiences and Insights Shared
Faculty fatalism doesn’t help, but neither does mere reassurance. In the US and Canada, many faculty members openly give the “we’re on a sinking ship” message, which makes it hard for students to believe in the purpose of their projects.

The promise of interdisciplinarity has often failed us. Having a certificate or other interdisciplinary training does not help us get jobs outside of German Studies Departments, for instance in Gender and Women’s Studies or in Judaic Studies. With a German Studies PhD, one most often has to stay in German Studies for positions. The voices who used to advocate for interdisciplinary approaches have faded. Language departments’ work still doesn’t translate well enough to colleagues across the institution, particularly in English and sciences. Meanwhile, our own promotion / review committees still don’t adequately support early career scholars’ publishing / presenting in neighboring fields, like African Diasporic Studies, for instance.

Recruiting BIPOC early career researchers in German Studies is irresponsible, if we’re recruiting people into precarity. Consider focus on supporting local teachers and organizations of Color, instead of just trying to attract people into your programs. Institutional diversity efforts are often flawed and are still often run by people who don’t look like the people they’re trying to recruit. 

Many of us still treasure a culture of knowledge, not entrepreneurship. Graduate Students often don’t want to go out and become atomized entrepreneurs; they/we want to do what research-teaching faculty do. Despite the bad signs, many graduate students often feel their/our lot is cast with faculty mentors, because we often pursue a similar set of values and visions about free thought, liberation, and discovery. 

It’s a mistake to close or shrink graduate programs. Graduate education is a lifeboat for free thought, creative collaboration, activism, knowledge-making, cultural production, and alternative political visions. It doesn’t all come down to the academic or non-academic job market. The most dangerous thing right now would be for us to dismantle our own departments’ graduate programs. The grass is not necessarily greener in other industries, which can be significantly more toxic than humanities graduate programs.

Graduate advising is currently contradictory, fractured, and out of touch. The imperative to pursue alt-ac and ac modes simultaneously ends up splitting attention and doubling doctoral students’ work. Some faculty are still trying to protect students from publishing, presenting, and service work, even though this approach hasn’t made sense since the 20th century. Faculty simply don’t know enough about what good jobs there are outside of academia with a PhD, even despite the MLA’s efforts over the past ten years.

The job market is not going to rebound adequately in the coming two to five years. We need to focus on the long game, especially since we were still reeling from the 2008 Great Recession and the subsequent mass closures.

Language learning is being devalued more broadly, beyond our individual programs and institutions. It’s a period of wrenching structural change in this regard.
 
Questions:

• Have Department Heads / Chairs / Deans actually pursued all possible venues to secure emergency sustaining funding for current graduate students? Are there really no stones left unturned? Who is advocating vigorously right now for new faculty hires?

• Can departments commit to hiring their own graduates for a year, or until the pandemic is over? There is an undue stigma on programs hiring their own students; this is hurtful to those who are hired. 

​Ideas and Desires: 

• Administrators and faculty need to see contingent labor as a central, rather than a peripheral, problem. If a position is exploitative and everyone knows it, it should be explicitly addressed and challenged.

• Tenured faculty need to actively help create more tenure-track, labor-just positions, and to reject exploitative labor practices. They need to support graduate student unions and contingent-faculty unions, and to remove barriers to these at religious institutions and in so-called “right-to-work” states.

• We all need to become as politically mobile and effective about our vision of education as the right-wing School Choice advocacy people are. We want to “build a university worth fighting for.” We want to be able to give an answer to loved ones about what one will do after the German PhD besides “probably nothing.” We are ready for the field of the future, and its habits / conventions, to be unrecognizable. Maybe it won’t be called German Studies at all.

• All tenured / tenure-line faculty who work with graduate students should have to act as if they too are on the job market every year, along with their students. They need to watch and monitor the job wikis along with us, misery or no. 

• All faculty have to come to understand the hiring / funding process better; this knowledge is often overly centralized in the Head / Chair. All faculty should read How University Budgets Work.

• We need to help each other evaluate and share information about German Studies positions in Asia, Africa, and Europe, and to crowdsource good jobs everywhere on social media. The wikis are not enough. Keep foregrounding solidarity rather than competitive approaches to the market.

• Graduate programs should build coop opportunities for graduate students that actually bring alt-ac experiences that are of benefit rather than burden. 

• Push for a universal 1-year contract extension for all graduate students and contingent faculty through the pandemic.

• Push for the formation of graduate student and contingent faculty unions at all universities.

• Collaborate with Coalition of Women in German around effective advocacy. Consult Putting the Humanities PhD to Work, connect.mla.hcommons.org, and the Böll Stiftung.

• If faculty mentors and advisors articulate advocacy in private conversations with mentees and contingent faculty, they should have the courage to voice the same in larger faculty meetings. Privately expressed sentiments of solidarity do not change precarious situations.

• Normalize applying for non-academic jobs and remove the stigma from doing so.

• In our fields, contingent faculty should never be asked to accept positions that are more precarious than their previous graduate fellowships. 

• Review procedural ethics of recruiting strategic / diversity hires. Are the hiring committees themselves composed of primarily white men? If so, the dynamics will be violent.

• Let’s not keep repeating this conversation every time we meet. Let’s turn these insights into action, now. We need immediate benchmarks to evaluate whether our collective advocacy has any effect this year.