Every now and then, a respectable university advertizes for a new, proper job in the humanities: a permanent, full-time, research and teaching post in, say, history or philosophy or literature. When this happens, the university will almost invariably receive over a hundred applications, and often enough over five hundred.
Several hundred applicants for a single job constitutes an extraordinary state of affairs. In general, such disproportions arise in environments where there is an overall employment crisis—for instance an industrial town whose industry has collapsed. Yet applicants for university positions are, by definition, holders of graduate degrees, and there is no apocalyptic employment crisis for holders of graduate degrees. The job market is not everywhere rosy for them, but they are certainly not in the situation of miners whose mine has closed. There is lots of work out there for those who can do the sorts of things PhD-holders can do.
Several hundred applicants for a single job constitutes an extraordinary state of affairs.
Moreover, the gap between the supply and demand of academic jobs is not some nasty surprise sprung on PhD-holders after they have finished their studies. The existence of this gap is no secret, and every minimally responsible doctoral supervisor and academic department provides aspirants, before they begin doctoral study, with the most brutal warnings about how unlikely it is that those three or five or seven years devoted to writing a thesis will lead in the end to a career in universities.
Nor indeed is such a career an earthly paradise. The pay is, in many countries, mediocre. The social prestige is variable—in many contexts, academics are seen as effete losers or as socially destructive ideologues (or both!). The work required is effectively endless, and much of it has been rendered stupid by commercial and social pressures channelled through university management. Many students are timewasters. All this is worsened by the supply-demand gap in jobs, which means that academics will submit to all sorts of humiliating rituals, because anyone tempted to walk away is easily replaced. Nor are these jobs—despite tenure-like arrangements—even particularly secure for the compliant, since the entire sector rolls from financial crisis to financial crisis, so that closing entire departments is common enough.
All of this raises the question of why academic jobs have become so very desirable, why there are a several hundred applicants for a single post. It is easier to become an academic than a popstar or a professional athlete. But it is not vastly easier—while it is orders of magnitude harder than becoming an accountant or a marketing executive. Yet academia hardly brings the glory, wealth or excitement allotted to pop and sports stars. Why do so many young men and women doggedly pursue this obscure and impoverishing path, knowing full well that, for most, it ends in a brick wall?
Why do so many young men and women doggedly pursue this obscure and impoverishing path?
Part of the answer is that, if school is the chief reality one has known outside the home since one was a toddler, staying in school forever may seem the obvious choice. But I believe the key cause lies elsewhere. For all the uncertainties and indignities of academic life, this form of work is now one of the few, within the white-collar spectrum, that, at its core, still offers substantial freedom and dignity, with the opportunity to think one’s own thoughts about interesting matters. Within universities, such promises are everywhere eroded, but they are not altogether false. A professor is not entirely the servant of the administrative or grant-distributing bureaucracies, or of student caprice. She is not entirely a product, or the purveyor of a product. A university-employed historian or philosopher, is still, some of the time, a real historian or philosopher, and teacher of history or philosophy.
For many, including many not particularly suited for such pursuits, being a historian or philosopher is far more attractive than being an accountant or marketing executive. There is no intrinsic shame in the latter sort of work, but for few is there any intrinsic joy. Such jobs have also often become both thoroughly exhausting and grimly monotonous. Even at worst, the academic philosopher can still hope that, here and there, she will be allowed to do some philosophy. There are few such hopes within the corporate labyrinth.
In short, academic jobs are so desirable not because they are so good, but because the alternatives are so bad. Post-industrial societies have turned out to be, inter alia, machines for reconfiguring work as an unwholesome, mind-dulling life in front of a screen or in banal meetings. Heaven knows that much progress has been made towards re-making the academic life in this image. But some part of it remains a survivor of an earlier world, where those who did not work with their hands could do something complex and nourishing with their minds. Unless this entirely disappears from universities, or reappears substantially elsewhere, those new university posts will continue attracting several hundred applicants.
