Minding the Gap: Length of precarious employment increasing for tenure-track linguists over time

Rikker Dockum, Caitlin Green, Roma Sarathi, Michaela Richter, Katharine Briggs, �& Savithry Namboodiripad

To do

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…please mind the gap �between train(ing) �and platform…

Motivations

• Public discourses indicate a sense that the academy is in trouble
• Casualization of academic employment, neoliberal “administrative solutions,” reduction of tenure lines, particularly in the humanities
• Epistemic injustice & exclusion
• A new groundswell of simultaneous AI utopianism & dystopianism

Motivation: Adjunctification of academic teaching

Are these concerns really true? Yes! And it’s important to confirm it.

• 4.5M people aged >25 have PhD in the US; doubled in two decades (Census Bureau 2018)
• 189,692 professors, 162,095 associate professors, 166,543 assistant professors, 96,627 instructors, 44,670 lecturers, and 164,720 other full-time faculty (NCES 2021)

How many people get a PhD in linguistics every year? (A lot!)

• Since 1966, 10,134 linguistics PhDs were awarded worldwide (LSA 2019)
• Over 50 years, US full time faculty fell 77.8% → 54.5% (NCES 2020)
• % full time faculty with tenure is falling each year (NCES 2019)
• See also: Hill & Klocksiem 2021, AAUP 2020, L.A. Times Editorial Board 2021
• Causes are economic and ideological (Newfield 2011, Childress 2019)
• With further enshittification since the pandemic began

Motivation: Discrimination

• Sex (Dyer 2004)
• Motherhood (Moors et al. 2022)
• Race & gender (Ward & Hall 2022, Flores 2023)
• “Cultural taxation”, the expectation that gender minorities, women (esp. WOC) do more service (Guillaume & Apodaca 2020, Zambrana et al. 2023) taking time away from dossier big ticket items
• Signed languages (Hochgesang 2019, Henner and Robinson 2021)
• Biased course evals (Hefferman 2021)

Motivation: Epistemic injustice

• Behavior in contexts related to knowledge production that excludes, silences, or ignores the contributions of certain people, often those historically excluded (Dotson 2012, Settles et al. 2022).
• Who determines the direction of the discipline of linguistics? (Charity Hudley & Flores 2022)
• Liberatory research directions discouraged by superiors (Lanehart 2021, Charity Hudley & Flores 2022)
• Citational injustice (Citational Justice Collective 2022)

Response: Studying institutions to work for change

• Research that tests pervasive ideologies sometimes produces “obvious” results, but that is important too!
• Create awareness where there might not have been
• Arm colleagues who are working for change with citations and data and graphs (and fervor!) to aid in their advocacy

Linguistics job placements

Haugen, et al. (to appear)

• Haugen, Margaris & Calvo (“A Snapshot of Academic Job Placements in Linguistics in the US and Canada”), 2019 data�
• Investigated unequal distribution of the 733 PhD graduates in tenure-stream jobs in the 63 standalone Linguistics departments at PhD-granting Institutions (PGIs) in the U.S. and Canada

Haugen, et al. (to appear)

Some of their findings include:

• In 2019, 12% of full-time permanent positions were occupied by graduates of 1 department (MIT), 25% were graduates of 3 schools (MIT, UMass, Berkeley), and 50% percent graduated from just 10 departments
• Fully 36% have placed zero (5/63) or one (18/63) current tenure-stream faculty member in Linguistics PGIs
• Demonstrating the presence of deeply hierarchical hiring patterns �(cf. Clauset et al. 2015)

Our contribution: Expanding the historical perspective

• Documentation: Bring data to bear to confirm or complicate “common-sense” observations about hiring trends in linguistics and beyond
• Intervention: Asking about trends over time allows us to discover and identify potential sources of shifts, with the goal of enacting change → Swarthmore has already begun using this research to advocate for more tenure lines!
• Take this data to an Administration Near You!
• Argue for the necessity to collect this type of data

Replicating portions of Haugen et al. for 2023 (N=775)

Top 10

9.4% MIT�6.3% Berkeley�5.7% UMass�4.8% Penn�4.4% UCLA�3.9% Stanford�2.8% Toronto�2.7% UCSC�2.6% UT Austin�2.6% Cornell�= 45.2%

Expanding the dataset

How we built on Haugen et al.

• Expanding the dataset diachronically
• Surveying the same 63 departments’ (52 U.S., 11 Canada) faculty positions in Linguistics departments
• Tracking employment trajectories of tenure-track and tenured professors from PhD to current position
• Covering tenure-track hires publicly announced as of the end of academic year 2022-2023 and extending back as far as possible with publicly available data
• Adding more categories to the datasheet
• Details on job promotion, data sources, and possible demographics

Coding categories

Categories from Haugen et al.:

• Name
• AcademicRank - Professor, associate professor, or assistant professor
• Year of PhD completion
• DestU - Destination university, i.e. where they were hired after PhD
• Gender*

Categories added after Haugen et al.:

• JobStart - Year they began working in that position
• JobEnd - Year they stopped working in that position
• JobEnd2- Reason for job change
• JobSequence - Number that corresponds to their current position out of their total number of faculty positions
• DataSource
• LSADirectory
• Ethnicity*
• Subfield*
• Carnegie Classification*

Coding categories: Gender, Ethnicity, Subfield, Carnegie Class

Some categories were more difficult to code for

• Lack of available data
• Categories including:
• Gender
• Originally in Haugen et al. dataset
• Renamed to InferredGender in our expansion
• Ethnicity
• Very scarce results using LSA member directory
• Subfield
• Difficult to compartmentalize
• Carnegie Classification (= R1, R2, etc)
• Uninformative results based on university ranking

Methodology of data collection

• All publicly available online data
• University faculty websites, personal websites, ResearchGate, LinkedIn, Orcid, etc.
• Demographic information collected from LSA’s opt-in directory
• Utilizing Internet Archive’s WayBack Machine to systematically scan through older versions of linguistics department websites
• Often does not extend past ~5 years
• Some department sites go all the way back to 2000

Step-by-step building on Haugen et al.

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1. Phase 1: Filling in Haugen et al
1. Internet scouring for data focusing on JobStart, JobEnd, JobSeq, and AcademicRank
2. Adding rows for each new promotion and position change - DataSource for CVs
2. Phase 1.5: Incomplete rows
• Attempting to fill in rows with ? values
3. Phase 2: Back-filling: Retired or deceased faculty
• Adding professors from emeritx and in memoriam pages
• Same school set and columns/categories as Phase 1
4. Phase 2: Forward-filling
• Same institutions as Phase 1
• Faculty hired since Haugen et. al (since 2019)
• Faculty found through the Wayback Machine

Difficulties that arose

• Lack of consistent data reporting
• Out-of-date departmental and personal webpages, etc.
• Lack of CVs published online (esp. senior faculty members)
• Inconsistencies in CVs versus university faculty or personal webpages
• Lack of detail in the CVs we could find
• Big holes in the data for
• Year of promotion
• Previous positions

A view of our spreadsheet

Ordered alphabetically by SourceU

Summary snapshot of the dataset

Total unique individuals: ~1500

Total number of actual CVs found: ~500

Total unique departments: ~200

Non-U.S./Canada institutions collapsed into single category for now

Non-PGIs partially coded but excluded from present results

Total rows: ~3600 (one row per rank per institution, for each individual)

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We know this dataset has a strong survivorship bias!

Exploratory Results

Gap from PhD to first tenure-track job has grown,

even among “survivors” escaping the precariat

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Mosaic plot: A type of stacked bar chart

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bar height = proportion within a category

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bar width = proportions of categories

within the whole dataset

Gap from PhD to first tenure-track job has grown,

even among “survivors” escaping the precariat

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x axis = Decade of PhD degree

Overall N=874

y axis = Gap between year of PhD and year of starting first tenure-track job

Gap from PhD to first tenure-track job has grown,

even among “survivors” escaping the precariat

Overall N=874

Gap between PhD and promotion to Assoc. Prof.�has also grown

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Overall N=518

Gap between PhD and promotion to Assoc. Prof.�has also grown

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Overall N=518

Questions which arose for us, i.e., immediate next steps

• The increased gap in hiring is likely not distributed uniformly. What factors are relevant?
• Discipline-specific? Are traditionally postdoc-having psycholinguists driving this pattern? What about the increase in postdoc-to-TT position programs which focus on DEI?
• Institutions?
• Demographic factors?
• What would the Haugen et al. graphs have looked like in the past?
• How has the ordering of institutions shifted within the ‘core’?
• Have institutions tended to hire within-”network” more or less over time?

What’s next?

(suggestions for questions to ‘ask’ the data, or how to visualize these results?)

In progress:

• Proper statistical analysis!
• Tenure-stream positions beyond Linguistics PGIs
• non-PhD Ling. depts & programs; other types of destination depts. for Ling PHD
• Another perspective: Looking at people who get their PhDs and where they end up! Rather than looking at people who get hired on the TT
• More complete demographic information
• Information about shifting department types, breaking down non-US/Canada information
• Figure out best ways to study people who ‘slip through the cracks’
• Code for research sub-disciplines

What’s next?

(suggestions for questions to ‘ask’ the data, or how to visualize these results?)

Potentially:

• Collect primary data?
• Seek cooperation from departments or individuals
• Collaborate with LSA committees
• Ad-hoc Demographics working group
• Coordinate across committees and SIGs who may different data on this

What can we/YOU do with this information?

• Inform students, postdocs! (Chat, it’s rough out there on the job market)
• Aid with / agitate for labor organizing in academia
• Further motivation for departments and institutions to continue to integrate non-academic career paths as part of graduate training and mentorship
• Use this information to advocate for tenure lines
• As longer postdoc precarity becomes the norm, we can/should advocate for higher wages, benefits, etc.
• Increased gaps could also be an element of choice, with longer postdocs being preferred to shorter ones! (very short-term postdocs can be inhumane)
• Useful context to evaluate candidates for hiring, tenure, and promotion

Thank you for minding the gap!

We welcome your feedback! What pervasive ideologies about academic employment can/must we address?

Remember to update your (department’s) website and your LSA directory info!

Plug for the LSA’s demographics committee!

Corresponding authors: rdockum1@swarthmore.edu, savithry@umich.edu

Thank you to funding agencies, Haugen et al. authors, and everyone whose website is up to date!