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.

The insights and advice presented here are not offered dogmatically. Rather, they are the best I can muster from my ten years’ experience with the professional job market, first as an African history job-seeker and later as a graduate placement officer. Despite the doom and gloom about employment that pervades the professional schools churning out M.A.’s and Ph.D.’s in the social sciences and humanities, it has been my experience that many advanced degree holders can still obtain meaningful and rewarding teaching careers. I have found that successful job candidates are often the people who seek work with the same drive, determination, and thoroughness with which they did their research in Africa.

The job market is very bad for academics, especially for those of us just out of graduate school. I wish I could tell you some guaranteed way to land a job or even to get an interview, but I cannot. As an anthropologist recently on the job market, though, I do have some very basic, common sense advice which I believe can help.

People seeking academic positions will find themselves dealing with a small, mysterious body which will either end their hopes or bring their candidacy to the brink of final success. Few applicants will ever be in a position to influence a department to hire them unless they first pass the scrutiny of a committee which screens credentials, arranges short interviews at major professional meetings, and decides which candidate or candidates will be invited to campus for inspection by their colleagues. Since the activities of a recruitment committee are generally puzzling to job seekers, who are likely to receive only short, formal, and perhaps tardy communications at irregular intervals, this description may be interesting, even if it does not reduce the anxiety level of prospective academics.

More and more frequently the Africanist who wins a tenure track position (hereafter termed a “real job”) is the one who offers something besides an impressive area expertise. Prestige universities are rarely hiring, and the few jobs opening up nowadays are usually at four-year colleges and two-year institutions which cannot, or firmly believe they cannot, accomodate full-time Africanists however much they may want African offerings in their programs. Faced with declining numbers of majors and insistent administrative demands for high body counts, or Full-Time-Equivalent (FTE) students, humanities and social science departments and divisions are looking for versatility in the personnel they hire. Teachers must be able to handle both general education courses attractive to underclassmen and a wide range of electives which will simultaneously challenge majors and attract non-majors looking for courses to fill out their schedules. Successful candidates to such positions have often overcome an academic Catch 22 publicized in many job advertisements—applicants seeking their first real job “must have one or two years prior full-time teaching experience”—by playing the part-time game, which has in recent years taken on many of the attributes of formal internship programs in other professions. For all the game’s drawbacks, the candidate for a real job who has played the part-time circuit well enjoys a major advantage over competitors who have not played it at all or who have played it badly, for a few very strong recommendations from superiors at places where a person has taught part-time can put that candidate in the running even for real jobs advertised as demanding prior full-time experience.

Last year legislators of the Commonwealth of Virginia sent to state college and university faculty a time-study questionnaire on which appeared a question of the following sort: “On a scale of one to five, rank the personal satisfaction you derive from each of the following: 1) teaching; 2) administration; 3) research; 4) sports; 5) your family.” While many of us have decided preferences for one or more of the first three activities, or even the first four, having to rank one’s family along with one’s job may seem somewhat inappropriate. Struggling academics may, in fact, neglect their families in the hopes of churning out sufficient copy to gain them tenure, and many marriages have foundered on less rocky shoals. Even so, American social categories regard the teaching-administration-research syndrome as work, something qualitatively different from one’s spouse or children. To the academic couple, however, the above question may make all too much sense.

Foreign universities are not the cure to the glut on the American job market, for the glut is a world-wide phenomenon, particularly in African studies. Americans already constitute a sizable proportion of academics in Canada, Australia, Britain, and Africa and the backlash against them is already developing in some. But some systems are still expanding, such as those in Nigeria and Australia, and they offer perhaps the best chances for jobs in the immediate future.

Fueled by oil money and the powerful belief of its people in the transforming power of education, the Nigerian university system may be expanding proportionately faster than any major system in the world. Consisting of only five universities (Ibadan, Nsukka, Ife, Lagos, and Ahmadu Bello in Zaria) during most of the first decade of independence, the 1970s have seen successive additions until the current projected number of universities is thirteen (spread among the twelve states that existed until 1976). The Nigerian government has indicated that it will try to hold the line at thirteen and not go through another round of new university creation so that each of the present nineteen states would have its own university. But even granting the leaders’ success in this resolve, the present commitments themselves mean that the university system will double in size between 1977 and the first years of the 1980s.

It is one of the misfortunes of a graduate education that students are exposed to a narrow range of career and employment models in the university environment. The most common model is that of the specialized university professor, and too many graduate students and Ph.D.’s make the very serious mistake of spending one or two recruitment years trying unsuccessfully to get work exclusively in the college and university professoriate in order to fulfill this single career goal. This perception is born out by the fact that university placement officers are suddenly deluged in August, the last month of the university recruiting year, by dozens upon dozens of unemployed Ph.D.’s in all fields asking, “What else can I do with my advanced degree?” I believe that the candidate who expands career goals and who seeks employment in the four year college and university teaching market and in other professional job markets at the same time can find well-paid and interesting career work. Multiple job searches can take forty hours a week and often have to be added to other commitments like part-time work or dissertation writing. Employment inquiries in non-academic professional fields take planning and a lot of hustle, for applications and job leads take months and months to mature just as they do in the academic market place.

Job hunting in the Federal government can be a frustrating experience to anyone unfamiliar with Federal personnel procedures—both written and unwritten. Therefore, it is particularly useful to proceed systematically when investigating this aspect of the alternative job market for Africanists. Otherwise, it is easy enough to waste time and miss specific opportunities. Upon deciding to venture into the Federal job maze, it is helpful to possess an abundance of patience, persistence, and imagination. Most successful graduate students ought to have mastered this trinity to perfection by the conclusion of their graduate careers. A fourth element might also be added—luck!