[lg policy] Job Slump Worsens for Language and Literature Scholars

[Harold Schiffman]

Job Slump Worsens for Language and Literature Scholars
By Audrey Williams June

The job market for language and literature scholars, already weak
before the recession hit, is likely to leave job seekers chasing a
rapidly shrinking pool of jobs for the next several years. A new
analysis of employment advertising conducted by the Modern Language
Association, to be released on Thursday, projects a 37-percent drop in
faculty positions advertised in the association's electronic job list
this academic year, compared with last year. The projection is based
on a comparison between the number of jobs listed in October 2008 and
October 2009. The decline would top last year's drop (26 percent),
which, at the time, was the steepest in the list's 35-year history.

Among the report's findings:

Positions in English language and literature are expected to number
900, a 35-percent decline from last year. The projection for
foreign-languages jobs is 750, a 39-percent drop from the year before.
Listings for both are well below the 1,000 to 2,000 positions
typically advertised.

Rhetoric and composition positions made up the greatest percentage of
jobs (20.1 percent) on the association's October 2009 list, followed
by British literature (17.9 percent).
In foreign languages, openings for Spanish professors made up
35.5-percent of positions on the list, a slight uptick from the year
before.

According to the MLA, which is the largest association of academics
who study languages and literature, the job list is the most accurate
way to track academic hiring trends for full-time faculty positions in
language and literature. One such trend highlighted in the report is a
continued decline in the number of tenure-track positions advertised.
Those are the jobs typically sought by new Ph.D's.

Tenure-track assistant-professor positions made up 53 percent of the
jobs advertised in English and 48.5 percent of those in foreign
languages. From 1997 until recent years, the association said,
tenure-track assistant-professor jobs usually made up between 55 and
65 percent of advertised positions.

http://chronicle.com/article/Job-Slump-Worsens-for-Language/62616/

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