NeMLA 2020 Roundtable: 'Getting Back in the Game': Professional Reinvention and Adaptation
Despite an increasingly grim job market outlook, the humanities continues to produce PhDs in large numbers. Between 2007 and 2017, the number of available Assistant Professor positions in the field of English dropped from 879 to 320. During the same time period, the number of non-tenure-track positions increased from 21% to 34%. Yet in 2016, 5,500 doctorates were still awarded despite the massive post-2008 decrease in obtainable positions. As Vimal Patel wrote in a Chronicle article from September 2018, “The mirage has vanished.