Faculty Positions at US Universities

Just a follow-up to the discussion on this post about the future of foreign English teachers in Asia. In the comments portion of the post, I discuss the hiring situation in Western universities with Patrick Cowsill. Related to this is an article in today’s New York Times entitled Doctoral Candidates Anticipate Hard Times.

The article is about how the current economic crises is making it even harder for recent doctoral program graduates to get the kind of jobs they want.

Many in the humanities fear that their fields are going to suffer most. Humanities professors are already among the lowest-paid faculty members, according to the Humanities Indicators Prototype, a new, decade-long effort to establish a database of information led by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences…William Pannapacker, an associate professor of English at Hope College in Holland, Mich., who writes a column for The Chronicle of Higher Education under the name Thomas Benton, has frequently tried to dissuade undergraduates from pursuing a graduate degree in the humanities. He is convinced that the recession will push universities to trim the number of tenure-track jobs further.

Although, as the article points out, the situation for many in the Humanities has never been that good.

Humanities professors are already among the lowest-paid faculty members, according to the Humanities Indicators Prototype, a new, decade-long effort to establish a database of information led by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. What’s more, nearly half of all the positions are part time — with no job security and no benefits — a situation that many educators expect to worsen.