Editor’s Introduction: Surviving the Job Crunch

Extract

Employment prospects in academia are the bleakest for new Ph.D.’s since the early 1950s, and there is little evidence that the situation will change in the 1980s. Between now and the end of the next decade it is estimated that tens of thousands of Ph.D.’s will be produced in the humanities and social sciences, and that the nation’s colleges and universities will be able to absorb only a fraction of the total. Employment prospects for students of third world areas like Africa are particularly dim. During the 1975-6 recruitment year only five or six tenure-track positions for African history graduate majors were nationally advertised for an active candidate pool of approximately 40-50 Ph.D.’s and ABD’s (All But Dissertation). This job market has substantially reduced the morale of graduate faculty and students since the halcyon days of full employment in the mid-1960s.