Humanities Unbound: Supporting Careers and Scholarship Beyond the Tenure Track

Graduate students in the humanities thinking about their future careers face a fundamental incongruity: though humanities scholars thrive in a wide range of positions, few graduate programs systematically equip their students for varied postgraduate opportunities. And yet, academic employment is an increasingly distant prospect for many doctoral recipients, with a dwindling proportion of tenure-track jobs available to an ever-growing pool of graduates. While the disconnect between the availability of tenure-track jobs and the single-minded focus with which graduate programs prepare students for that specific career path is not at all new, the problem is becoming ever more urgent due to the increasing casualization of academic labor—the shift from full-time positions to piecemeal adjunct positions, most of which offer menial salaries, no benefits, and no job security—as well as the high levels of debt that many students bear once they complete their degrees. At the same time, people with advanced humanities degrees who find stimulating careers in and around the academy but outside the tenure track are becoming increasingly open about their experiences, as is clear from the vibrant activity on websites such as #Alt-Academy, Versatile PhD, and more (" #Alt-Academy " ; " VersatilePhD "). Despite the fact that many graduates continue to identify as part of the scholarly world while pursuing satisfying careers beyond the professoriate, to date there has been very little data available about this body of " alternative academic " scholars—people with advanced training in the humanities who do not pursue careers as tenure-track faculty members, but instead work in and around academic structures in arenas like libraries, museums, archives, humanities centers and labs, presses, and more. Comparable previous studies have tended to focus on PhDs working in " non-academic " jobs, a problematic label that excludes or mischaracterizes the roles of people working in hybrid roles within and around university structures. Other studies have focused on a narrow subset of disciplines as stand-ins for the full range of the humanities, which gives an incomplete picture. While graduate programs can help prepare junior scholars for a much broader professional world than simply the professoriate, without data it can be extremely difficult to make a case for changes, or even to know what kinds of changes would be effective. To that end, the Scholarly Communication Institute (SCI) has completed a study investigating perceptions about career preparation provided by humanities graduate programs. The survey results help to create …