[URBANTH-L]Re: The Temp-Scholar Market and the Future of Anthropology

[Angela Jancius]

From: Dimitra Doukas <dimitra.doukas at gmail.com>

I just read your post to URBANTH-L. Corporatization and the dominant market 
ideology loom large in our predicament, but I wanted to mention another 
aspect of the situation.

Four or so years ago I put together some figures on the anthro job market 
for a seminar. My source was figures then published on the AAA website. I 
just counted up PhDs granted and academic hires in the couple of years for 
which data was posted and found, to my surprise, EIGHT times as many new 
PhDs as new hires. These calculations were incomplete as the hire figures 
did not include our casual labor market but they point up something 
interesting.

Bureaucratic status in the academic world as in the business world is based 
on the size of your budget and the number of people you 'supervise.' As the 
number of hires began to shrink (when was the turnaround?), department 
chairs did not accordingly shrink the size of their PhD programs because 
their own and their department's incentives all lined up against that 
sensible move. 10-15 years of chairs' holding onto large programs produced 
the glut of PhDs that made the academic sweatshop possible.

not cheery news but there's no good remedy without good analysis

don't let the bastards get you down!

Dimitra