Grad. school deferments for anything except medicine and maybe some hard sciences ended long before I went there. There was a national draft “lottery” and you pretty much knew your number and draft chances by graduation time. (I should note that one-third of my entering group were women, although nothing close to real equity pertained). Besides, Nixon was “Vietnamizing” the war and draft pools were declining pretty steadily through the early 1970s. There were actually 38 names on the list I was handed the first day, but 8 were listed as “Transfer from Oriental Studies,” so I always used 30 as the real number.

Intergenerational equity is a hard thing to obtain, esp. in an industry as self-indulgent as academics. Robert Townshend rocketed to fame in the mid-90s with a pretty low-tech handcount analysis showing that between 1985 and 1995, tenure-track lines in history departments listed in the AHA guide actually rose by about one per department (contrary to what was even then the standing critique about downsizing and a strategic shift to contingent academic labor). Hardly robust growth, or maybe even sustainable growth, but real growth nevertheless. In retrospect it’s pretty clear that graduate programs, in competition with each other, used that modest quickening to ramp up their admissions rates. That memo perhaps irresponsibly predicting a looming wave of retirements was pretty clearly part of that initiative. In the process, some number of people from the lost gen. who had somehow remained viable by taking one-year jobs serially, or what were then called “alternative” history posts (later re-branded as “public history”) doubtless got swept aside in the institutionally-understandable preference to stock up on newly-minted majors uncontaminated by all that stuff. If an industrywide initiative had emerged to identify and re-absorb them (if still qualified), the flood of new students wouldn’t have happened and the predictive retirement memo might never have even been written.

Nobody can be blamed for all this, but it’s not as if a comet slammed into the earth. Academia is about predicting climate change, commodity resource demand shifts, and all sorts of complex behavioral phenomena. The academy will never write the actual critical history of itself in the post-60s generation. Who would advise a student to take something like that on and hope to live to tell about it? All this said, it’s entirely too true about the corporate university part. But that model would only benefit from mandatory retirements of expensive senior staff.

And Roxie: how bad would someone’s grammar have to be if it’s evident at a coctail party? (Or is that just a lame conversation opener?)

Your entering class at said university was 30!?! You leave out a few critical points of information: the Vietnam War was on, there was a draft, and I assume that grad students could get deferrments? Was that one reason the ranks swelled right around 1968?

The snows weren’t any deeper in my day, but I think Robert Townsend would document that until about the time Historiann entered, there were whole series of years when there were barely one or two advertised searches, if that many, per year in some major fields of historical inquiry. The trough after 1990 was not nearly that deep, nor did entering cohorts at most programs ever again approach thirty. (The defining obscene feature of the early 1990s recession was eighteen or so advertised searches in a given field followed by twelve or fifteen cancellations, often far along in the application or even the interview process). But, while attrition has been a major feature of academic life even when jobs were chasing graduates (way before my time!), placement ratios have been far higher for the last two decades than they were for the two before that. That’s basically what created the sphere that gradually came to be called “public history.”

(There would be problems with expanding public history MA programs in many history departments, though, mostly because of some historians’ odd hostility to public history. But it would be a fight worth having, I think.)

Regular faculty positions are hard to come by, but I’m not someone who calls for grad programs to scale back. There are lots of other careers people can follow with graduate training in history, especially in public history and school teaching. I think potential grad students should be given a realistically bleak forecast as to their chances of landing a tenure-track faculty position, but no one has a gun to their heads to go to grad school. (And, as I said in the post, it seems entirely rational from the perspective of many recent college grads with liberal arts degrees who don’t want to go to law school…)

Mary: don’t bother with Canada. Their laws are very strict about having to hire qualified Canadian citizens first. And, it’s a very, very small country. (Population-wise, it’s I think 1/10 the size of the U.S.)