In our new “how can we help you?” thread, a reader asks:
This might seem a bit broad and/or pessimistic (I promise I am not a Debbie Downer!), but I would like to continue to discuss (perhaps in a regular series?) the major disruptions to the academic philosophy job market that are on the horizon, and what PhD programs/schools/at-risk-of-being-laid-off-faculty are doing about them (or should be doing about them).
At my regional state school, our CLAS has effectively been told that budget problems are bad and will only get worse, recruitment isn’t a viable option, and that each college will have to make “major structural changes” to adapt to the new normal.
What makes this extra grim is that roughly 80-90% of our college’s allocated budget is faculty salaries — not the university’s budget, the college’s, since most of the discretionary stuff got cut years ago. So “major structural changes” at the college level can only mean some combination of:
(i) pay cuts (ii) layoffs (iii) upping teaching loads (iv) shifting faculty to from upper-division courses to high-enrolling gen-ed intro courses (v) merging departments / eliminating chairs (vi) not replacing TT faculty who retire or move (vii) and converting vacated TT lines into NTT lines/adjunct positions
I actually do not think our university is in particularly bad shape relative to many other smaller schools or schools in more rural areas – I think our problems are (or soon will be) the new norm. Many states are projected to lose 20–30% of their high school graduates over the next 20 years.
Over that time, then, I think there is a very good possibility that full-time academic philosophy positions will go down by at least 20-25% and tenure-track lines down closer to 30-40% from where we are now. Among the remaining TT lines, I think teaching loads will go up at state schools, so that a 2-2 line is no longer the norm unless you are at the fanciest of the fancy.
I would genuinely love to be wrong about this, and if you have better numbers please share them. But my worry is that PhD programs/departments are not changing course at the pace needed to address the issue – if there will be a 30% decrease in new TT lines over the next 15 years, and the market is already bad, I think we as a discipline must aim to either (i) produce 30-40% fewer PhDs and/or (ii) emphasize alt-ac placement just as hard as academic placement, which would likely involve radically reimagining programs.
What are people doing to prepare for this disruption? Are TT faculty at at-risk schools (trying) to flee? Are R1s seeing far more applications from TT faculty trying to flee? Are grad programs planning on further reducing cohorts? Are very low-ranking PhD programs going to close their programs (or would doing so simply lead to more layoffs of their faculty)? Are smaller departments planning on shrinking their size?
Do any readers have helpful insights to share?
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