Sphinx

What should an academic career in the humanities look like today – beyond “not like this”? The question is prompted in the short term by the fact that Mary Beard, to mark her retirement, has taken the opportunity to promote discussion of the academic precariat and the extent to which things have changed over the course of her own career; but if, like me, you use Twitter partly as a means of networking with younger colleagues and early career researchers, this is a topic which has long been pretty well impossible to avoid. One way of trying to think about it, from a not-as-old-as-Mary-but-still-moderately-decrepit-and-comfortably-established perspective, is to wonder about the ideal against which the present situation is being compared; what is it so much worse than, and when did it all change?

No, this isn’t an attempt to segue into “actually in my day we had it so much worse than you snowflake youngsters. Cardboard box?” I am, I hope, quite conscious of my own privilege here, above all the fact that my entire education was publicly funded rather than involving student fees and debt. But I think a bit of historical perspective might offer a starting point for reflection.

So, back to the 1990s… My own experience was one of getting through the fourth year of the PhD on a mixture of what we’d now call zero-hour undergraduate teaching jobs, hardship funds and my supervisor hiring me to do some preliminary work towards a planned Collected Papers, while failing to get anywhere with applications for Junior Research Fellowships; for the following year – just as I was busy applying for the civil service – I was hired as maternity cover for six months in Lampeter, and with a bit of extra income for examining in the summer term, managed to make the salary cover nine months before moving back to my parents for the summer. By this point I had been offered a further two-year contract in Lampeter and a permanent position in Bristol, so didn’t need to worry about staying more than three months in the family home or going back to civil service applications – but I had no sense that this was guaranteed, not least because my JRF applications had continued to impress absolutely nobody. In one alternative timeline I could have quit academia at that point; in another, I got a two-year extension and then couldn’t find anything else after that.

Were any of these possibilities more or less normal for the time? I’m not sure; thinking of my rough contemporaries, there are some who followed a similar trajectory into permanent positions after a couple of temporary teaching jobs; some who got JRFs and then moved seamlessly into longer-term positions in Oxbridge; some who got JRFs and then permanent posts elsewhere, some who got JRFs and then didn’t find any other jobs, some who never got even temporary posts, some who never tried, and some who embarked on careers of temporary positions that continue to this day. And all these people were fully qualified with PhDs and a track record in giving conference papers and the like – it was an older generation, now long since retired, where you found people who had apparently wandered into permanent lectureships or fellowships without actually getting round to acquiring a doctorate or any sort of research record, and that was surely linked closely to the contingent circumstances of the massive expansion of higher education in the 1960s.

So, not everyone got a job, let alone straight after the PhD; great researchers and teachers were already falling out of academia, and it was already possible to imagine a career of endless temporary posts (not least because I remember setting myself a time limit for how long I’d be willing to do that). I’ve no idea of which path was more common, or in some way normal, back then, and I’m not sure how you’d establish this with any certainty. Is it possible that our current sense of crisis is shaped partly by persistent memories of the generation that really did easily got jobs in the 1960s, and/or by the dominance until relatively recently of Oxbridge graduates who had (on average) a better chance of getting a JRF to write up the PhD and hence put themselves in a better position for a permanent job, and/or the survivors’ bias that we see the people who got jobs not the ones who didn’t?

Some things have undoubtedly changed. Firstly, the expectations of qualifications and achievements to be taken seriously for a permanent position have mushroomed to an absurd degree – actual publication record not just plans, social media profile, impact ideas, experience in everything – which partly reflects the impact of the REF and mostly suggests that there really is a higher level of competition for positions, such that job adverts can demand such things and would-be applicants find themselves in a never-ending arms race to have done more than their rivals.

Secondly, it seems plausible that there are more post-doctoral research opportunities, with the greater emphasis on big research grants with PDRAs – scarcely a thing thirty years ago – and on externally funded research leave requiring fixed-term replacements, all driven by the demands of the REF. This doesn’t mean that any individual ECR has a better chance of getting one – that depends on the level of competition – but it is surely easier than it once was for some ECRs to extend their sequence of temporary positions rather than quitting academia altogether at an earlier stage.

Thirdly: I have no data, but I imagine that there may simply be more people completing PhD study. Partly because it offers an obvious explanation for the escalating competition noted in point one, partly because PhDs represent income and prestige and an element in REF so there’s an imperative for universities to recruit more of them, partly because of increasing internationalisation with the UK now drawing from a wider pool of potential researchers. If this is the case, has the number of permanent jobs expanded proportionately? Probably not; some departments have certainly expanded, especially as a result of the change in the student fee regime and expansion of student numbers, but others have not, or have declined or been closed.

Fourthly – and I am really not saying this to try to dismiss the issue – the problem is simply more visible, with the advent of social media. People talk about their experiences, and there are public discussions of the issues in structural terms, where once this was a matter of individual misery/anxiety or at least small-scale conversations with a few fellow ECRs, seeing everything in terms of one’s own inadequacies. The problem has been named, and enough organisations like CUCD and people with responsibility and power in individual departments have acknowledged its existence that there must be at least some hope of stopping things getting much worse too quickly. It’s identified as a problem rather than just the way things are.

Of course there is a downside to this international solidarity, insofar as differences between national systems can be obscured because of the dominance of US-based perspectives. There are undoubtedly issues with some 9- and 12-month teaching fellowships in the UK, and the extent to which the duties and the lack of funding for individual research may undermine the chances of that person then getting a permanent position; and there is always something worrying about seeing someone with a string of temporary positions in the same department, even if that might be the least bad option for that person if the alternative was having to move round the country every year. But I still feel that, thankfully, we are still a way away from the thorough-going adjunctification of higher education on the US model. I appreciate that this is no comfort whatsoever to those who find themselves in precarious positions at the moment, or can see this coming down the line, but we have to name the problems accurately to have any hope of tackling them.

Where does this leave us? I don’t feel any more certain about what the expected, or rather once-upon-a-time expected, academic career looks like to those at the sharp end. Insofar as it’s something like my experience – a couple of years of precarity and then a permanent position for the lucky ones – then comparing now with thirty years ago suggests it’s a matter of degree rather than step change, with the biggest factor – maybe – being that the supply of qualified ECRs has absolutely no connection to the actual demand for them, beyond people being warned by social media or individuals that the academic job market is really tight. Indeed, if you want to get pessimistic, it looks as if it’s going to get a whole lot worse…

This all leads me to wonder if one of the ways in which I have been fortunate in my academic career, besides actually having one, is that I have never had more than one graduate student applying for academic jobs at the same time – I have never had to choose to support one over another, or worry about how to decide between them. I’ve known supervisors with lots of students who will back one student for years, at the expense of others, because of their judgement about relative quality or because of personal affinity. I’ve known supervisors who operate something like a ‘fair chance’ policy – if student A hasn’t got anywhere after a year or a couple of interviews, then weight of support shifts to student B. I can imagine that some supervisors make carefully calibrated decisions about which student to support for a specific position. I have had the luxury of showing unqualified enthusiasm every time.

I don’t otherwise have any sort of conclusion to this, other than to admit the limitations of my own perspective. I would be genuinely interested to know what ECRs do have in mind as the sort of academic career they ought to have been able to expect, and where they think this model comes from…