The reason white male academics can’t get jobs Affirmative action isn't solely to blame

For instance: this week, 84 jobs are advertised under “History” on the international career website jobs.ac.uk, of which the majority are temporary positions. By my reckoning, around 10% — a significant trend, though not overwhelmingly so — have a direct or indirect reference to non-white ethnicity. Vacancies include: a career development fellowship in West African history; a professorship in “Anticolonial, Postcolonial and Decolonial Histories and Praxes”; a research fellowship in archaeology aimed at candidates “of Black Identity or Heritage”; a studentship entitled “Mapping Fossil Colonialism in Asia” and another on “Decolonising the Pathways between Soil Science Agricultural Policy”; a career development fellowship in “Global (African) History”; and a “Research Fellow in Reparative Studies of Education”. (In what sounds like a project guaranteed to put kids off academia for life, the latter examines “reparations and reparative justice in school education” and collaborates “with primary school-communities in the city of Bristol to design and conduct in-depth ethnographic and oral-history research on the features and mechanisms of structural inequities”).

Though the managers who wrote these adverts might not admit the fact, it seems safe to assume that in their ideal scenarios, the associated posts would not be filled by white men. Still, there are more David Austin Walshs in humanities subjects than you might think: beavering away on some heinous aspect of the Atlantic slave trade, settler colonialism, Jim Crow or forced migration, hoping it will save them. Undoubtedly, they believe they do valuable work, and some do; but that isn’t to say they would have made the same research choices in a different context. Universities have been in the grip of transitory intellectual fashions for centuries, and today is no different.

Such transactional behaviour doesn’t fit with the popular archetype of the unworldly scholar, going only where his curiosity takes him for nothing more than the thrill of the chase. But the contemporary chronicler of negative European legacies need not be cynical or self-loathing; no more so, anyway, than any other person with ambition, naturally gravitating towards what will serve as a means of getting ahead. On the contrary, looking for a competitive edge in this crowded field makes him a rational actor. Thousands of freshly anointed doctorate-holders are disgorged every year into an international jobs market that’s already heaving, and permanent positions are vanishingly rare. This, I submit, is the more immediately convincing explanation of why Walsh cannot get a job: simply put, the numbers game is overwhelmingly against him.

In 2020-21, there were nearly 105,000 doctoral students enrolled in UK universities, which coincidentally was around the same number of staff employed on academic contracts at the time. One survey reported that 67% of doctoral students desired an academic job at the end of it; in reality though, only a small proportion of them could possibly succeed. Since then, the number of PhD students has reportedly risen, yet undergraduate numbers in the arts and humanities are falling, and many universities are either making redundancies or are on the brink. In other words: this does not look like a good sector in which to invest several more years of your one wild and precious life.

Equally though, it is far from clear that doing a PhD gives you an advantage in non-academic fields either. Having perhaps hung around for a couple of temporary research associate jobs after your doctorate, or nearly killed yourself in short-term teaching positions covering other people’s leave, once you eventually accept your fate and get out of academia you will have to start again as a junior to peers of the same age. You will probably have substantially more debt than them, and some employers will now perceive you as fatally over-specialised.

The only recent study I know of which tries to gauge whether there is a financial benefit to getting a PhD finds a “modest” premium for doctorate-holders over the course of a lifetime, but less so for humanities than for other disciplines. It also notes that financial benefits tend to accrue late in one’s career, due an increased association between PhD-holding and management positions. Arguably, this makes the outlook for arts and humanities doctorates worse not better. Temperamentally, the sort of person attracted to spending four years furrowing his brow in a dusty archive may not be a particularly natural fit with management.

So, why do people still pursue PhDs in subjects like History at all? One plausible answer is that they don’t know how poor their chances are of getting a university post at the end of it. Though managers and research council heads occasionally make vaguely deprecatory noises — after all, most universities run doctoral programmes at a financial loss they can barely afford — the information does not seem to be filtering through to the average applicant. And it’s hardly their fault.

On the contrary, university websites tend to contain enthusiastic descriptions of the benefits of postgraduate studies. At departmental level, many faculty members are extremely keen to entice potential doctoral applicants from their existing pool of undergraduate and Master’s students — more plainly, to intellectually groom them — for the self-interested reason that having a strong record of doctoral supervision is often a condition of successful promotion as a lecturer. Other staff have research specialties that don’t lend themselves to teaching on big undergraduate courses and so also have a vested interest in supervising as many PhDs as possible, in order to maintain an appearance of earning their keep. And then there’s the fact that, for some, having doctoral students around the place is treated as a sign of prestige, and speaks more to their vision of the leisurely discursive joys of academic life than giving repetitive lectures to masses of bored undergraduates.

In short, then, those already working in universities cannot be trusted about the true value of a PhD in relation to the prospects of those they supervise. They have too much skin in the game. Lured in by fantasies — both their own, and those of their supervisors — it is all too easy for doctoral students to start imagining themselves as fully-formed lecturers before they have finished their first chapter; at which point nobody wants to tell them they don’t actually stand a chance in hell. Many are exploited by management for cheap teaching labour while pretending it will increase their career chances, and that doesn’t help dispel the fantasies either. In my experience, trying to warn someone halfway through a PhD that they should conjure up an alternative plan for the future doesn’t go down well — the time to say this was probably before they told all their relatives they had decided they were going to be a lecturer.

For a professional sector so stuffed with moralists obsessed with informed consent, it is perhaps surprising that a relatively grave injustice is done to thousands of new doctoral students in universities every year without anyone really noticing. What isn’t as surprising is that, at the other end of the experience, the victims of the scam — for what else can we call it? — tend to feel angry and disillusioned. A bit like disappointed incels once sold a dream of romance, depressive types with “Dr” emblazoned on their credit cards mope around university cities, heads full of incommunicable knowledge and hearts full of embitterment, unable to fully accept that their imagined story arc didn’t work out even after all those flattering things their supervisors and examiners said. Though resentful would-be intellectuals are not the easiest of characters to feel sorry for, in this case we should probably try.

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Kathleen Stock is an UnHerd columnist and a co-director of The Lesbian Project.

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