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Reflections on the Tales of the Next Generation
- History of Political Economy
- Duke University Press
- Volume 34, Annual Supplement, 2002
- pp. 309-316
- Article
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History of Political Economy Annual Supplement to Volume 34 (2002) 309-316
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Reflections on the Tales of the Next Generation
Evelyn L. Forget
It is a challenging time to be working in the history of economics, and it is difficult to comment on such personal essays in a useful way. But your experiences raise important issues for all of us. I wonder if your representation of “the reality” is as empirically sound as it might be?
Why Do I Find Your “Facts” Suspect?
I think that sometimes perceptions of reality are based on a set of myths that, because they are not articulated, have more power than they would if they were exposed to the light.
Myth One:
“There are no jobs.”
Almost everyone represented in this volume has had the experience of searching for job candidates in recent years. We know that the market has shifted. We know (although you might not) that there are more jobs in economics than there are strong candidates. We know that we list desired fields, with little hope of actually appointing a specialist in the fields advertised. And we also know that, even in the much poorer job market [End Page 309] of the 1980s and 1990s, most of us were hired even though we applied for jobs that did not list history of economic thought as a desired field.
Among the “facts” presented was a list of seventeen jobs (fifteen tenure-track!) from Job Opportunities for Economists between August 2000 and February 2001 (Brown and Saunders, this volume). If we put that number into the context of the past ten or fifteen years, seventeen jobs begin to look like quite a lot. But there was no list of jobs for other subfields, nor any indication of the number of potential candidates in our own or any other field. I don't think that we can conclude that the candidate-to-job ratio in our field is higher than in other fields. I have seen no evidence to support the claim.
What if, instead of reading the job ads in Job Opportunities for Economists, you read the front sections of the Chronicle or the Times Higher Education Supplement? This won't help you find jobs, but it will give you a sense of the anxiety that is motivating administrators who recognize that they are now beginning to face a sellers' market. It is very difficult for most small universities to hire economists of any persuasion; most are not in a position to be too selective about fields.
Myth Two:
“There are no good jobs.”
This is a little harder. Only one of the listings in Job Opportunities for Economists had a graduate program in economics. Most of the small colleges, you claim, are less selective than they might be. You also mention the presumed onerous teaching load at small colleges.
I can't help but give you some career advice here. Ignore it at your peril. The worst of all possible worlds is to take a job in a weak graduate department. Most graduate students think all Ph.D. programs are pretty much alike, and they imagine employment at such a place as an ideal. They imagine joint publications with good graduate students, a lot of interaction, and mentoring. It comes as a great shock to find yourself in a department full of weak Ph.D. students. The graduate program is exceptionally expensive; it sucks resources out of the undergraduate program so that you do a good job of teaching no one. You are under constant pressure from your chair to raise the grades in your graduate classes and to “help” various students pass their exams and write their dissertations. Most of the students are not competitive for national awards, and so you are under pressure to win grants to keep them alive by hiring them as [End Page 310] research assistants. There is little satisfaction in watching a student graduate with a very marginal dissertation and seek a job for which he or she is not competitive. And...