This
was originally posted at History@Work, the blog of
the National Council for Public History. Please leave comments at the original.
Academic
careers are hard to come by these days. Public historians will not be surprised
by the posts on the active #altac hashtag on Twitter or the Social Science
and Humanities Research Council of Canada’s (SSHRC) recent “White Paper on the Future of the PhD in the Humanities”
that observed that only between 10 and 15 percent of those who enter PhD
programs will be employed at a post-secondary institution [1]. A declining
number of tenured and tenure-track positions, coupled with an increased
reliance on precarious labor in the form of adjunct and temporary appointments,
has destabilized the academic job market for graduates. Deep budget cuts to
museums, archives, and other research-oriented institutions–not just in history
and the humanities, but also in the social, physical, and life sciences–make
finding “traditional” public history jobs increasingly difficult as well.
As
a second-year PhD student working towards defending my dissertation proposal
and completing my qualifying exams this term, I do not have the answers to
questions about the utility of a PhD, but I am interested in designing my
project with an awareness of the challenges facing new graduates. As Abby
Curtin notes in her recent post on History@Work, while theses provide
opportunities to explore rich historical questions, it doesn’t mean one
shouldn’t be strategic in project design or have an eye towards future
employability.
I
returned to school last fall after spending five years working full-time for a
variety of governmental departments and agencies in public history and allied
fields–work which stemmed from a paid internship while working on my MA in Public History from Carleton University. As
my work life shifted away from hands-on research, I hung out my shingle and
began consulting on a part-time basis. In returning to academia with this “real
world” experience, I find my new challenge isn’t re-adjusting to academic
reading (both in terms of quantity and quality) or imposing discipline on a
largely unstructured day. Rather, it is in designing research questions and
methodologies that recognize the reality of the labor market and also pass
muster from both my supervisor and my committee.
Generally,
my default position is the path of least resistance. In the case of my
dissertation project, which looks at Ottawa’s Central Experimental Farm
(Consultant Committee co-chair Adina Langer wrote about her visit to the Farm
during the 2013 NCPH conference), this would mean focusing on time periods
where my research would take me to the archives. As one experienced consultant
told me when I was just getting started, the simple fact of being in the archives
can open the door to contracts.
Many
archives that I will be using, such as the Library and Archives Canada and the
Archives of Ontario, maintain publicly accessible consultants’ lists. Being on
these lists and physically present in the archives makes it easy to begin
building expertise and a client base, and it offers the chance to make good
mistakes while staying within the safety net of departmental funding. Indeed,
I’ve received most of my consulting work through these lists. Perhaps
unusually, I had one client send me a check for significantly more than my
invoice, insisting that my rates were too low. At the same time, potential
clients have let me know that I’ve quoted too high a rate when they turn down
my bid. Over time, I’ve become familiar with certain archival collections,
including Record Group 17 (Department of Agriculture) and First and Second
World War attestation papers, allowing me the ability to provide fixed-bid
project, rather than hourly, quotes with confidence.
Funding
agencies, such as SSHRCC, often require applicants to include knowledge
dissemination strategies in scholarship proposals. Some universities, those
with digital humanities programs in particular, have funds to support
interdisciplinary collaboration between, say, a historian and a computer
scientist to develop an online exhibition or a mobile app. Selecting teaching
assistantships that include project management duties or that require students
(and therefore teaching assistants) to liaise with community partners is another
good way to build a project portfolio while still in graduate school.
One
of the challenges is drawing the marketable skill out of the academic task. As
Heather Lee Miller points out, many aspects of consulting are foreign to the
academic mindset [2]. The concept of the billable hour, when I first confronted
it in a litigation support context, barely made sense to me. And yet teaching
and research assistantships in Canada are often limited to the 130-hour per
term work limit imposed by external funding agencies such as SSHRCC, making
tracking hours on what are effectively medium-term projects essential to most
graduate school experiences. Moving from what is essentially a very poorly paid
salaried position to one where hourly rates matter requires a leap of faith–one
I have not taken on a full-time basis. Nonetheless, there are plenty of resources available for those looking
to get started.
[1]
The white paper states that approximately half of entrants do not complete
their degree and of those who remain, between 20–30% find work in a university
or college. Note that. in Canada, “colleges” do not generally grant degrees,
but “universities” do. It is also not clear from the report whether this figure
includes all PhDs working in universities and colleges or only those in tenured
or tenure-track positions.
[2]
“The Business of History,” Journal of Women’s
History (Winter 2013). (Note: Paywall)
~
Pete Anderson is a PhD candidate in Geography at Queen’s University,
Kingston, where he studies the social and environmental history of Ottawa’s
Central Experimental Farm. He has worked in public history and allied fields
for the Canadian federal government and as a public history consultant. As a
consultant, his clients have included family historians, academics, and
provincial heritage organizations. Pete is a member of the NCPH’s Consultants
Committee and can be found on Twitter @dairpo. He occasionally blogs at his personal website,
at Active History,
and on the blog of the Network in Canadian History and the Environment.
