From: Tom Spear, U of Wisconsin
<tspear@facstaff.wisc.edu>
Thanks for your responses for information on this year's job market. As it
turns out, there is not enough information to go on yet, and the
Chronicle's deadline is up. I have thus submitted the following article,
which they will edit down to a letter to the editor. This contains much of
the data I have gathered so far, and I wanted you to see the full version.
Ghettoizing African History?
Thomas Spear
Last year Professor Jan Vansina of the University of Wisconsin
resigned publicly from the American Historical Association in
protest against the association listing misleading job vacancies by
institutions who, he felt, were illegally favoring certain categories
of applicants without taking account of equal quality. And now
Philip D. Curtin, Professor of History at the Johns Hopkins
University, has joined his former colleague in decrying the 'use of
racial criteria in filling faculty posts in the field of African
history' in a Point of View article entitled 'Ghettoizing African
History' in *The Chronicle of Higher Education* (March 3, 1995).
Professors Curtin and Vansina are certainly not alone in this regard.
There is a widespread perception among white job candidates that
many of the jobs in African history are targeted exclusively at
minorities. Indeed, Curtin cited ominous language in one such
announcement confirming such fears. And Nell Irwin Painter,
Professor of History at Princeton, concluded a comprehesive study of
recent hiring practices in the field of history overall, in which she
conclusively demonstrated that affirmative action has not, in fact,
resulted in discrimination against white men, by bemoaning 'the
unfortunate practice of using jobs intended to diversify
predominantly white male faculties to fill positions related to
particular fields.' ('The Academic Marketplace and Affirmative
Action,' *AHA Perspectives*, 31/9, December 1993)
Concrete evidence of so-called 'reverse discrimination' is hard to
come by, but what evidence there is indicates that there may be a
substantial gap between popular perceptions of such discrimination
and the reality of appointments in African history. Having both
conducted a job search in the field this year and been responsible
for placing our own graduate students, I can, however, cite figures
for this year's job market. We have received listings this year for
42 entry level tenure-track jobs in which African history was
identified as either the primary or secondary field. At the same
time, our own search in African history resulted in 52 applications,
45 of which were from junior scholars, 10 of whom were already
employed in tenure-track positions. If all the announced vacancies
are filled, then, every currently unemployed candidate should
receive at least one job offer. Judging from invitations to
convention and on campus interviews, however, this has certainly not
been the case to date, but it is still too early in the hiring season
to tell what percentage of candidates will be successful.
Of the 52 applicants for our own position, 40 (77%) were male and 12
(23%) female; and 39 (75%) were white, 12 (23%) African, and 1 (2%)
African-American.
As it happens, these figures roughly match those of our own graduate
students in African history over the past thirty years--66 (78%) of
whom were men, 19 (22%) women; 64 (75%) were white, 12 (14%)
African, and 9 (11%) African-American. And most of these, of
whatever ethnicity or gender, have been successful in gaining jobs;
76 (89%) are employed in academic jobs today.
The figures for both this year's applicant pool and for our own
graduates historically are thus quite similar. Whites (75%) and
males (77-78%) have predominated throughout, while women (22-23%),
African-Americans (11-2%), and Africans (14-23%) have comprised
lesser percentages of new PhDs. The only significant shift appears
to be a declining number of African-Americans and an increasing
number of Africans in the current pool. It remains only to see how
these figures for graduate students correlate with actual employment
patterns.
An informal survey of the membership directory of the African Studies
Association for 1992 (the latest available) reveals the following for
identifiable scholars employed teaching African history at all
levels: male 75%, female 25%; white 78%, African-American 7%, and
African 15%, thus nearly matching the profiles of graduate students
above, especially if African-Americans and Africans are combined (25%
of recent PhDs; 22% of those employed).
recent PhDs UW PhDs Faculty
men 77% 78% 75%
women 23% 22% 25%
white 75% 75% 78%
Afro-American 2% 11% 7%
African 23% 14% 15%
n 52 85 334
While these figures are far from authoritative, they do suggest a
couple of things. First, there are not a disproportionate number of
Africans and African-Americans employed in the field relative to those
earning PhDs. In fact, the relative numbers of whites and blacks have
remained remarkably constant since the field started to develop over thirty
years ago. Second, there are, if anything, a declining number of
African-Americans actively seeking PhDs and jobs in the field, their
shrinking numbers being augmented of late by increasing numbers of Africans
seeking employment here. The result is that affirmative action goals
targeted at America's own historically oppressed minorities continue to go
unrealized, and no amount of targeting individual positions can possibly
reverse the trend so long as more and more schools chase fewer and fewer
candidates.
Thus the widespread perception of 'reverse discrimination', fueled by
evidence of unreasonable and misguided searches, does not seem to be
borne out by the reality. If anything, in fact, the declining
number of African-American graduate students and faculty calls for
redoubling our efforts to recruit and train promising
African-Americans, as both Curtin and Painter rightly emphasize.
The problem is not limited to African history. Academic careers
generally have not been very popular among promising undergraduates
during the last decade, due no doubt to the lack of job opportunities
and low salaries compared with other careers. Minority students have
been little different, and graduate schools have been finding it
difficult to recruit students for minority fellowships in all fields.
The overall value of affirmative action in enlarging, diversifying,
and invigorating the field of history seems indisputable to me. I
previously taught at a prestigious small liberal arts college whose
faculty before it first admitted women students in the early 1970s
was composed almost exclusively of white males recruited privately
within the Ivy League. As a result of open advertisements and
aggressive recruiting for all positions subsequently, applicant pools
became more representative of fields at large and consequent hires
resulted in a much more diverse faculty, not only by gender and
ethnicity, but also by geographic origin, graduate training, and
class, thus enriching the college as a whole and significantly
increasing opportunities for white males outside the Ivy League along
with those for women and minorities.
I thus wholeheartedly agree with Professors Curtin, Vansina, and
Painter that affirmative action goals can only be achieved by
aggressive pursuit of all candidates in all disciplines and fields,
not just in a few positions targeted at minorities. The later
strategy is bound to fail, unfairly limiting minority candidates to
certain fields, demeaning the achievements of all candidates, and
bringing affirmative action into disrepute, especially among people
who have normally been among the most supportive of its goals.
As Painter reminds us: `The two aims--diversifying faculties and
teaching courses in minority history--both entirely commendable,
should not be confused. The confounding of the two goals has had
several negative results, including the deprivation of students who
want to take courses that lack teachers, the conduct of misleading
searches, and the embitterment of nonminority scholars.'
Meaningful affirmation action, thus, has to take place across the
board lest the significant gap between an actual decline in the
number of African-American graduate students and faculty, and
increasing white perceptions of their dominance derail the process
entirely. Far from meeting our objectives for fair and
representative hiring, university administrations that target
particular faculty positions to advance them threaten only to bring
about their untimely defeat.