My question I want to pose to the group is simple, but I’m sure there’s room for differing opinions: has the job market for comp folks gotten better or worse or stayed the same since D’Angelo’s speech almost thirty years ago? And, in addition, is there the same sense of possibility in the air now—or has that sense of possibility tapered off?
Monday, July 20, 2009
Something simple to start with...
As a grad student, my brain perks up when I come across statistics about the academic job market. On the first page of Frank D’Angelo’s speech “Regaining Our Composure,” he states a statistic about the openness of the composition & rhetoric field. He writes, “of the 405 jobs advertised in the ’76-’77 for people with Ph.D.’s in English, 56 of those jobs were in rhetoric and composition, 53 in linguistics, and 29 in creative writing” (71)... Then he goes on to list how few jobs there are for those who teach areas like British Literature, Black Studies, Colonial Literature, etc.
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I don't *actually* know anything in real life but I've been told the r/c market is 5 times better than the lit market (so says RD), and phd programs are popping up in greater numbers, which would indicate to me a comparable sense of possibility... take a look at our program, for example, and the number of people in your matriculation cohort alone, heather, who are expressing interest in all things r/c. we don't even have an r/c track! i hardly think the enthusiasm in mcmicken is an anomaly.
ReplyDeleteI like solid numbers like that. Now I can walk around with "5 times better" in my head...even if it's not entirely perfectly accurate, I'm sure it's close to reality.
ReplyDeleteI don't know about the "5X better" mantra, but I'd say there's no decline in interest around r/c. The growth in phd programs, journals, professional conferences, and book series indicate a lively community of teacher-scholars. According to the latest MLA report, r/c ads accounted for 17% of all job ads in English (beat only by Brit lit at 20%). This is not the most conclusive data, though, because not all depts advertise in MLA and because the numbers don't account for canceled searches. Still, a pretty good indication of a healthy market (see full report, if you dare, here: http://www.mla.org/pdf/09jil_midyearreport.pdf). The instability of the economy will impact all of us, regardless of specialization...
ReplyDeleteThanks for that report link, Laura. Very helpful:)
ReplyDeleteMy Masters advisor wisely told me that r/c is most always a "buyer's market" whereas Lit is most often a "seller's market." I like thinking of it this way because, as Laura is suggesting, there is still a great challenge we all face heading out into the market. There are no guarantees, no matter our specialization. We are at all times impacted by factors we have no control over.
ReplyDeleteAllison's comment raises something else for me, which is the gap between lit/cw and comp in terms of interest. It's very interesting to me to try and understand what about comp/comp-rhet seems uninteresting or unrelated to study in lit and cw.
Much of the reading this week has tread over this instability in the position of comp/rhet in English Studies. And this is a fascinating question/problem because it seems obvious to me to think of it as the 'view from the center.'