Out of a train-wreck curiosity about what’s been happening to the historical profession, I’ve been watching the numbers on tenure-track hiring as posted on H-Net, one of the major venues for listing history jobs.
[Update 10-2: switching to US and Canada only. An earlier version of this included other countries, even though I said it didn’t.]
We’re now into October. Usually–I know now–this is the period by which half the tenure-track jobs for any cycle have been listed.
I wrote this year’s report on history majors for the American Historical Association’s magazine, Perspectives on History; it takes a medium term view of at the significant hit the history major has taken since the 2008 financial crisis. You can read it here.
There’s also an interview with me about the topic in the Chronicle of Higher Education.
I have a new article in the Atlantic about declining numbers for humanities majors.
I put up a new post at Sapping Attention about . In short, it’s been bad enough to make me recant earlier statements of mine about the long-term health of the humanities discipline.
Fields of study should and will keep changing, but they don't need to do so out of the fear that their very survival is at stake. By Benjamin Schmidt.