The Perpetual Job Crisis Needs a National Strategy
The “job crisis”—the changing but permanent shortage of tenure-track jobs—has molded literary studies for half a century. It has damaged the careers of several generations of literary scholars and is doing the same to the next.
There are always some jobs, but never nearly enough: every member of every MLA field is aware of the problem and is concerned. And yet after fifty years of employment “crisis,” we have no national policy specifically focused on increasing the number of tenure-track academic jobs.