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CW: Academic Job Market- Really, this shit’s depressing.
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A semi-annual job market reflection. Last year, I counted 61 job ads written for PhDs in Theatre and Performance Studies for academic positions beginning in the 2020-2021 academic year.
38 of those ads were for tenure-stream positions & 23 were for non-tenure stream full-time contingent searches. Of these 61 gigs, 29 failed (47.54%). In a typical year that number is somewhere between 18-25%.
I have to assume that the vast majority of failed searches were searches that were cancelled because of Covid-19. 18 of the 38 tenure stream searches failed (47.36%) and 11 of the 23 non-tenure stream full-time searches failed (47.82%).
So that leaves 20 Assistant Professor/Open rank tenure track positions (I’m not counting positions that specifically called for Assoc./Full only). Five of those openings (25%) went to people who moved laterally from one institution to another.
Eight gigs (40%) went to folks who hold the MFA as a terminal degree (one of those was also a lateral hire). So that means that only eight jobs went to PhDs in Theatre and Performance studies who were taking their first-tenure track position.
Of the 12 full-time contingent searches that succeeded. Folks with the MFA as the terminal degree acquired five of those gigs. As I always write as a caveat for these posts, I’m only documenting jobs in which the PhD/DFA in Theatre and Performance Studies is listed as a...
requirement or a preference, nine of those positions went to folks who hold MFAs as their terminal degree. Now again, some jobs that I suspect might have been written with a preference or requirement for MFAs could have gone to PhDs. I can’t know that.
I will note that this phenomenon almost always tends to happen at very small institutions where a department has few faculty members.
Of the 15 PhDs in Theatre and Performance Studies who were hired last year, two write about pre-19th century performance and seven write about...
Of the 15 PhDs in Theatre and Performance Studies who were hired last year, two write about pre-19th century performance and seven write about...
BIPOC communities in the United States or about theatre and performance beyond North America and Europe.
Sadly, this year’s academic job market is catastrophic for the field.
Sadly, this year’s academic job market is catastrophic for the field.
Typically, one might see might see 30-40 tenure-stream and full-time contingent positions posted for PhDs in Theatre and Performance Studies by this date in any other year this decade. This year there are 11 as of today.
The field produced 177 PhDs from January 2018 to December 2019. We must, must, must prepare our doctoral students for careers outside of the professoriate and our graduate students must begin to imagine themselves in more diverse careers.
