Here, as of April 17, 2019, were some campus ministry positions open:
Notice: lots of Catholic institutions listed. Also, an Ivy League, a Lutheran college, and a couple west-coast private, non-affiliated institutions.
So far so good. There's a job market, which means there's a demand.
But who will provide the supply? Therein lies the worrying details.
Turns out the faculty positions are now all, with one exception, contingent positions. I.e., not tenured--no professional development, no institutional investment in the faculty member's work and research. This in itself isn't a surprise; The Chronicle of Higher Education and other publications have noted, with no small amount of gloom, about the academy's changing employment practices. It is, as some have called it, the "Uberization" of the academy. All faculty are now on-demand employees, each working independently with separate customers/employers for minimal amounts. No permanency, no long-term commitments on anybody's part--faculty, staff, administration, or students.
The American Academy of Religion, the leading professional academic organization for religion scholarship, has made some notice of the sudden rise in contingent faculty. You know what? It's not enough. Each year more and more jobs advertised on the AAR's website look like the above: contingent positions with no long-term prospects. There are, of course, exceptions. The elite institutions still have the money to hire full-time tenure-track lines in Religion. Some more confessionally-oriented institutions, like the University of Mary shown above (2nd pic, last line), will (infrequently) open tenure-track lines.
Both examples, though, are exceedingly narrow pathways to career security. Everybody and their dog applies for the elite Ivy-League and almost-Ivy-League positions. It's a different version of James Joyce's description of Catholicism: "Here comes everybody." Institutions get their pick of the litter/applicant pool. Mary and other noticeably Catholic institutions (there are at least evangelical and Lutheran parallels) demand a different research and teaching skill set than most graduate Theology programs provide. Even Catholic heavyweights like Notre Dame, Catholic University, and Boston College do not produce annually very many new Theology PhDs who can immediately speak and contribute to Catholic identity as it's pursued at Mary or Steubenville or Christendom. In Catholic theology, we have an over-supply and under-demand problem: each year more Theology PhDs get awarded and each year more and more tenure-track positions dissolve into adjunct or temporary faculty lines. The market is already flooded. The job market has shrunk to either increasingly few and remote elite jobs, an equally few jobs at conscientiously-confessional institutions, and the great mass of contingent faculty.
Something.must.change.soon.
Of course, we already know the answer: nothing will change voluntarily because:
a) institutions stand to benefit from the current situation; and
b) this includes Theology departments with graduate programs justified by steady/increasing enrollments.
I.e., in order to satisfy larger institutional goals, Theology/Religious Studies graduate programs are sowing the seeds of their own, and their students', destruction. To save themselves today, they must flood tomorrow's job market.
Just recently Inside Higher Education just posted this op-ed arguing for a shorter, more practical framework for doctoral studies, especially those in the Humanities. Author Michael Zimm:
Ph.D.-granting departments have a moral responsibility to take into consideration how their program requirements impact their students’ potential earning power and financial stability. Universities should look to their counterparts in Europe that have shorter time frames to degree completion. In fact, since American universities hire European Ph.D.s (sometimes over American Ph.D.s whose degrees took longer to complete), there is little advantage for graduate students to be saddled with onerous degree requirements that have nominal professional value once they explore career options outside academe.
and
Humanities Ph.D. programs should also consider limiting their annual enrollment numbers so that they are actually training students for tenure-track academic positions that their Ph.D. students will actually fill. (I’m excluding postdocs, visiting assistant professors and adjuncts, since most first-year students don’t envision these contingent positions as the type of jobs they will one day have.)
Read the whole thing here. Zimm hits the nail right on the head. Institutions have a moral responsibility to reconsider just how they're training doctoral students, how many students should be trained, and for how long.
That being said, anyone inspired by "disruption" models of management needs to slow their roll. Disruption might appear good/effective to the disruptor, but those being disrupted probably have a different take. Do institutions need revitalization? Obviously--just look at the broad and diverse history of new religious orders in the Catholic Church. But that's not disruption as practiced in the academy now.
The radical option--simply eradicating all Theology/Religious Studies programs altogether (sort of like Wheeling Jesuit's nuclear option discussed below)--solves nothing. Sure, it frees up salary funds for other faculty positions. Sure, it frees up courses for more popular major programs to fill with their own curricula. There's another managerial/philosophical question underlying all this: if one claims to adhere to an institution's mission, can one then really disrupt an institution according to that very mission? Mission embodies and expresses an institution's deepest values and high, aspirational goals. Can one then acknowledge all that and then say: "Based on the mission, we're blowing the whole thing up and rebuilding anew!"?
Thus my post two years ago here: The contingent faculty reality undermines Catholic identity. If the only courses that address mission and identity are taught in a department staffed primarily, or perhaps almost entirely, of adjunct faculty, then a) the institution clearly does not value such classes nor its own mission and identity; and b) it shouldn't surprise anybody that students display decreasing willingness and ability to discuss their own institution's mission and identity.
- They won't know it because they haven't been taught it.
- They haven't been taught it because there are fewer folks hired with academic training in these fields.
- There are fewer hires to tenure track because the market is flooded; it's much more cost-effective to hire contingent/adjunct faculty for these non-major courses.
Meanwhile, smaller, usually private, institutions have been closing at an increasing rate. In the Spring 2018 semester it was Mt. Ida College in Massachusetts. This spring semester it's been:
* Southern Vermont College
* College of St. Joseph (VT)
* Green Mountain College (VT) (btw, that's three in one [tiny] state)
* College of New Rochelle
* And several others listed here.
Add to this the radical reconfiguration of Wheeling Jesuit University announced in April. WJU fired all its Humanities faculty, including the Jesuits. The order then promptly pulled its affiliation with the institution. So "Wheeling Jesuit University" will remain open...but under a different name and identity than "Wheeling Jesuit." So not a closing, but a wholly negative transformation.
Catholic social media filled with the now-customary pleas for hiring the newly-terminated faculty. Apparently nobody seems to have gotten the email: academic administration simply does not create new faculty positions like that anymore. Furthermore, who would an institution rather pay in a tenure-track line: a newly-minted PhD with a starting faculty salary or an established scholar who could request twenty or thirty thousand dollars more per year? And everybody should know the real answer by now. Any new position will be filled not with full-time positions but rather with the Uberized and readily available adjunct pool.
Future posts will have to discuss the prospects for the public/academic intellectual life in light of these changes. That might not be fully possible until the water recedes. I wonder if what we've seen so far are just the signs of a far greater catastrophe looming.
The rain will continue. So when the levee breaks, will we have any place to stay?
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