A reader has pointed me to some additional data on this morning's burning question about American History professors. Out of a total of 245 doctorates awarded in American History, here's the racial breakdown:
Give or take a bit, just under 100 tenure track positions were hired in American History in 2022. The total number of non-white American History doctorates in 2022 was 55. This suggests there's still plenty of opportunity for white folks even if every single non-white PhD stayed in academia and got hired—which is distinctly unlikely. If I had to take a horseback guess, I'd say that roughly 60-70% of American History hires are white people, split about evenly between men and women.
Pingback: Overall, academia remains pretty white – Kevin Drum
A lot of the 100 hires would have consisted of academics who already have continuing appointments but wanted to move to another university for whatever reason. "Churn" in the academic labor market is probably greater than in most professions, as people look for colleagues willing to collaborate in a specialised research field.
Or those who hold temporary appointments, postdocs, and so forth.
Even thirty years ago, when I was in grad school (albeit in a different field), it was rare for a newly-minted PhD to move immediately into a tenure-track position, and I can't imagine that this has become more common since then.
There is also a glut of PhDs from previous years who didn’t get jobs. The mismatch between academic jobs and applicants in all fields has been an ongoing problem in History for years now. The guy in the original tweet is correct that he’s unemployable, but it’s not because he’s white. It’s because he’s a History PhD.
He didn't say he couldn't get hired because he is white. He said that he couldn't get hired because he was a white male. Drum thinks among white hires half will be men and half will be women, which isn't close to correct over the past five years.
Take the place where he currently works at as a Postdoctoral Associate. There are 10 faculty members that cover 20th Century American History. Five of those are white males, the other five are women of various ethnicities. All of them hired more than five years ago. His problem isn't that he is a white male, his problem is that he has a specialty for which you can count the available positions around the entire country on any given year with the fingers of your hands. He is just looking for a convenient excuse for his own failures and/or lack of foresight.
"s that he has a specialty for which you can count the available positions around the entire country on any given year with the fingers of your hands." Claim is contradicted by the fact that Drum explicitly said 100 were hired in the year 2022. In fact, the odds of landing one of these coveted jobs is orders of magnitude higher in this discipline than in engineering or science.
A 40% ratio of academic jobs to graduates is orders of magnitude better than in science or engineering.
meanwhile, in the real world, arthur grand technologies (a fine texas-based IT shop) put out this job posting
“U.S. Born Citizens [white] who are local within 60 miles from Dallas, TX [Don’t share with candidates],”
https://wtop.com/loudoun-county/2024/05/after-whites-only-job-posting-va-tech-company-hit-with-fine-from-the-justice-department/
https://i0.wp.com/boingboing.net/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/image-142.png?fit=1&resize=620%2C4000&ssl=1
Men way outnumber women among History undergrads. There is no reason to assume the number of professors is equally split between men and women. Same situation in philosophy.
40% of those who received an undergraduate degree in history are women and 38% who received an undergraduate degree in philosophy are women.
Considering that more women get an undergraduate degree than men, the fact that men outnumber women in these two fields by a 60/40 margin does suggest more men are likely to be in these faculty positions.
Whew. Thank god Kevin wrote 2 posts setting the record straight about this important issue affecting 0.0000742424242% of the American population. All 245 of those American historians can rest assured that reverse racism doesn’t exist in the lucrative field of American historying.
Elite overproduction is something that affects all of us.
Obsessing over the petty details of this case (the leopard-face-eating supporter loser, upset that his face was being eaten by leopards; his subsequent pathetic groveling struggle session tweets; how many historians are hired each year by whom; etc) is utterly missing the real issues.
Entitled White middle/upper-class whining is also something that affects all of us, especially since an entire political party, led by one of the most entitled and grievance-obsessed White men in the history of humanity, seems to have caught a very noisy case of it.
A nation that constantly whines like a bunch of spoiled children is a nation in rapid decline.
I think the math you illustrate above, illuminates a very different issue. 245 new history PhDs, and only 100 tenure track positions: lets guess there are another say 50, much less desirable, adjunct history professor openings.
Unlike, say a STEM PhD that has direct job potential in the business world, most history PhD's desire to work in academia. Yes, despite five plus years of very low pay and a lot of special training, a significant number of history PhDs end up unemployed or underemployed (perhaps teaching at a high school).
To me, the math means we are creating too many history PhDs....
The ratio of stem PHD's to job openings isn't 40% it's far less than 10%. Since research funding for STEM profs is vastly larger than fir History profs, they are required to produce dozens of PHD's over their career.
How are Asians 1.8% of a population of 245? You might expect they could be 1.6% or 2%. How did 1.8% happen?
nice work!
The take home lesson of this is that if you're in high school and you really want to be a professor, american history is the best path to follow.