O'Donnell, 'The Job Market (1990): Jobs' URL = http://hegel.lib.ncsu.edu/stacks/serials/bmcr/bmcr-v2n01-o'donnell-the 2.1.20, opinion The Job Market (1990): Jobs All over this bright land, about a hundred classics departments are in thethroes of hiring. This is a ritual that generally gives all participantsoccasion for a pleasant self-pity not unlike that which recovering fluvictims, whose season this also is but who are generally more fun to bearound, enjoy. To be sure, the candidates are more worthy of our sympathythan the hiring departments, but the hiring departments have more experienceand their self-pity has a certain elegance. Of course, bull-fighters alsofind their jobs wearisome at times, and nobody really feels sorry for thebull. In the last issue of BMCR, I catalogued and commented on the pool ofcandidates who present themselves for employers'' consideration this year. So what does the market they face look like? The comments that follow arebased on the APA job lists for the months of July through January: whatadditional jobs will appear on the later lists are mainly temporary andpart-time, and will be few in number at all events. Numbers: There are by my count 100 jobs advertised in the seven monthssurveyed. Thirty of them are temporary, fifty-nine tenure-track, and elevensenior or possibly senior in rank. Compared baldly to numbers of a similarkind that I retain from four and five years ago, these numbers are remarkablystable (January 1986: 91 jobs, 55 tenure-track, 21 temporary; January 1987: 99 jobs, 57 tenure-track, 27 temporary). Readers of my last column willrecall that the consistency in production of candidates was comparable overthe same period. (The 1975-76 and 1976-77 lists, in my archives from a timewhen I read these lists with a very different kind of eye, show totals in thelow 80s. I cannot now verify my recollection that the placement book ofcandidates was rather thicker, perhaps by as many as 100, in those days.) What kinds of candidates are the employers looking for? There are 46jobs that look for generalist lang./lit./hist. candidates of one kind oranother: sometimes a bias towards one language or one subject can be seen,but I have included in this category all jobs that might reasonably go eitherto a pronounced Hellenist or to a confirmed Latinist. Leaving those aside,the breakdown of jobs more specifically advertised vis-a-vis candidatesavailable is as follows: Greek Latin History Archaeologyjobs 10 21 15 8candidates 86 55 44 49 This pattern is also old and secure: more Latin jobs, more Greek candidates;and far more archaeology candidates than advertised jobs -- and manyarchaeology candidates are not trained to pursue the generalist jobs, andmany of the generalist jobs are slanted to discourage archaeologicalcandidates even if they have the languages. So how is the market this year? I think the important news is that thisis now once again a subjective question. If people you know are doing well,it's a pretty good market; if they aren't (and in my neighborhood theyaren't, especially), it's not so good. What is important and different aboutthis is that the period of unrelieved objective badness seems to be over forthe moment. Reactions to the raw data of the market are inevitably personaland opinionated. I have tried to label the following paragraphs helpfully tosteer readers away from ones they will disfavor. Hobby-Horse about Canon Exclusivity: It is hard for me to look at thespecifications without thinking that the traditional canon is in very littletrouble among classicists at least. If candidates are passing up Ennodius towrite on Ovid and Euripides, as I pointed out last time, it is in largemeasure because hiring departments are looking for people to teach Euripidesand Ovid. Most advertisements are studiously vague, but Georgetown wantsGreek tragedy and Latin epic, for example, and Penn State is interested inAugustan literature. Eccentricities are few and mild: in a potpourri list,Ohio State mentions ``Late Ancient Philosophy'' but Texas Tech wants somebodyin a ``mainstream area of classical Latin'' (good bet that means Ovid aheadof Ennodius, or even Silius Italicus ahead of Augustine). A phrase (fromSwarthmore) like ``the full range of Greek and Latin language andliterature'' should not go unnoticed: by the `full range'' they mean ofcourse little or nothing after 200 A.D. for either language, though in bothlanguages the greatest bulk of surviving material by far comes from afterthat date; and by insisting on that ``full'' range, they automaticallypenalize eccentricity of various kinds. Of course our graduate curricula dothe same: you can only become a classicist by reading the same texts yourforebears did, and if you learned the language later than they, gettingthrough that canon is going to take you longer and leave you less time to letyour imagination roam. You will still think that the ``central periods'' arethose when the military hegemony of small communities was making itself feltover a wider territory: Athens, Macedon, Rome -- their glory is the focus ofour profession. Students of classical literature responding to the impulsesand possibilities of contemporary theory have done so more by taking newapproaches with canonical texts than by going very far beyond the politecanon of approved authors; our historians have shown more imagination andgone further afield into provinces and centuries with something new to offer. I will dismount the hobby-horse only upon observing that to one who spendshis working life awash in primary texts that have no critical editions, noserious commentaries, and bibliographies vastly shorter than those of thecanonical texts, this disproportion seems absurd. (The recent CWbibliographical survey finds 700+ titles on Homer from 1978-83; for the sameyears, I find 13 titles on Ennodius. I would suggest that the correctproportion is not necessary 350/350, but perhaps 500/75 would not beinordinate.) Necessary Disclaimer: The APA list is the only dependable source ofinformation available for classics jobs, but it has its limitations. (1) Thedistinction between positions definitely available and positions possiblyavailable is extremely indistinct. Many jobs in the first category gounfunded, many in the second materialize. There is no accurate source ofinformation to use to judge how many jobs are actually funded and filled eachyear. (2) There are jobs filled each year that don't get advertised here,generally at the two extremes of the market (high-prestige senior positionsand part-time temporary positions with no prestige at all). (3) The desiredspecialties and qualifications listed are often misleading. Sometimesdepartments are merely looking to ``draft the best available athlete'', apolicy I have applauded ever since Gil Brandt built the Dallas Cowboys of the1970s by finding people like Too Tall Jones in places like East TennesseeState. But sometimes departments are merely suppressing internal quarrelsuntil after the convention by looking for lots of things when in fact ashrewd observer could have told you beforehand which specialty was actuallygoing to get the preference. And sometimes they are just dreaming: the onesthat sound as if the only person they will hire crosses the talents ofWilamowitz, Mommsen, and Levi-Strauss are probably in for long self-pityingwrangles over candidates who bear a closer resemblance to Elias Stoeber. Unnecessary Kvetch: There are a lot of gaps in our systematicinformation about our profession. How many students with knowledge of bothlanguages and at least three or four years of both are applying to Ph.D.programs in any given year? How many people actually finish Ph.D.dissertations in any given year? How many tenure-track jobs are actuallycreated and filled in a given year? What is the percentage of tenure-trackcandidates who actually go on to tenure? What happens to those who don'tmake it? All of those questions are susceptible of precise and accurateanswers, but it would require I think a concerted effort by the APA to gatherand assess the data. Why not? James J. O'Donnell University of Pennsylvania