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.
