The Job Market in French and Francophone History (2015-2024)
Executive Summary
Authors: Nimisha Barton, Nick Underwood, Christina Carroll, and Meredith Scott
It’s no secret that there are fewer tenure-track faculty jobs in colleges and universities than there once were. The reasons for the disappearance of these jobs are many: from the privatization of the higher education sector and its shift towards neoliberal management styles and practices to larger-than-life catastrophes such as the 2008 recession or the 2020 pandemic that forced hiring freezes, if not the shuttering of departments or certain colleges altogether. Against this background, it would seem that our tiny corner of the historical discipline -- French and Francophone history -- may not survive the purge. But rather than indulge in a doom and gloom narrative, we write this white paper to spur on a radical rethinking of the PhD process. Indeed, our goal is simple: to cultivate a data-driven conversation about the field that moves those of us thinking about the fate of French and Francophone history away from hand-wringing and towards a rethinking of our collective approach to doctoral education for French and Francophone historians.
Key Findings
Our field’s first-ever statistical portrait of the French and Francophone history tenure-track faculty job market yields the following findings:
There are few traditional “French” history positions available, although France is occasionally listed as a subfield or regional focus within a broader search
There was not a substantial drop in French history jobs available during this period, but the numbers were consistently low, ranging from 0 to 3 positions advertised each year.
There are fewer history and Francophone studies jobs available across all the fields included in this study.
Key Recommendations
Our report offers a comprehensive survey of recommended interventions and initiatives to support graduate professionals no matter what career pathway they pursue. We approach the question of career diversity for PhDs as one that requires intervention from the advisor level to the broader institutional level spanning undergraduate and graduate studies and perhaps beyond.
Undergraduate faculty mentors and departmental advisors should be clear about what graduate school entails, be transparent about post-graduate job prospects for traditional academic tenure-track jobs, and encourage students to enter graduate programs where there is a climate and apparatus of support for students regardless of their career pathway.
Departments and institutions must equip faculty who train doctoral students with the knowledge and resources required to effectively mentor graduate students who may not pursue traditional positions in the academy as they themselves did. This includes everything from questioning the assumptions that all graduate students should want to be faculty to incorporating skill-building into doctoral training that would be useful for a variety of careers, academic careers included. Above all, departments must seek to cultivate a culture that supports and encourages graduate students to pursue a variety of careers, whether inside or outside the academy.
Institutions must continue to invest in centers and programs that support graduate student professionalization and experiment with other models that have a proven track record of success when it comes to equipping doctoral students in alt-ac positions after graduation. The white paper goes into additional detail about what these programs might entail.
Our professional organizations should continue offering pooling resources and offering programming that serves the various needs of today’s scholarly community.
Future Directions
This report establishes a foundation upon which we must continue to build in order to refine our systems of support for graduate students and rethink doctoral training in the twenty-first century. Moving forward, we anticipate issuing a new report annually that features updated job data while exploring additional related questions. Eventually, we hope to open up a wider avenue of inquiry that shifts us away from merely asking questions about the state of the job market to instead exploring quality of life issues among those who pursue tenure-track positions under present circumstances. In other words, this report is not data collection for data collection’s sake. Rather, it has the potential to drive new conversations regarding our field, including one of the most overlooked issues: who stays, who leaves, and why?
Typically, reports of this kind are undertaken at the institutional level, for example in Institutional Research units staffed by data scientists. What distinguishes this report from others is that it is not bound up with any single higher education institution, which affords us, the researchers and writers, a greater critical distance than would a summary produced by institutional insiders. Given the import of such studies, we strongly encourage the major professional societies in our field to collaborate to support this research moving forward.
Finally, as a study conducted by humanities-trained scholars, we believe this report provides its own model for how people inside the humanities can and should produce data about our discipline in order to drive a new and more productive storyline about the future of our field. Indeed, reports like this offer an opportunity to enter the public conversation over “the end of the humanities” from a new perspective, one that is more solution-oriented and centers the value of the humanities because it is, quite simply, driven by humanists.
