To the editor:
Anthony Iaccarino’s observation that the 31 percent increase in the number of annual Ph.D.’s granted in history over the past five years is “astonishing” (Perspectives May/June 1997, p. 38), calls for the obvious follow-up question: Which departments have been admitting larger and larger numbers of Ph.D. candidates even as the job market remains static?
Here at Yale we decided around 1990 to reduce our Ph.D. entering numbers from about 30 to around 21 to respond responsibly to the difficult job market. With the exception of one year when we had a quite unprecedented “take up” rate on our offers, we have kept very close to the lower figure. I assume that many other
Ph.D.-granting departments have acted just as responsibly. But it would be interesting to know which places elected to go in the opposite direction and increased the number of Ph.D.’s when the national hiring trends in education cautioned against such a policy. Perhaps Mr. Iaccarino or someone else interested in this phenomenon could produce a report for a future issue of Perspectives?
Paul Kennedy
Dilworth Professor of History
Yale University
To the editor:
Your article, “Forging New Ties to Labor: Reformulating the Academic Labor Coalition,” in Perspectives (May/June 1997) was much appreciated. It captured the progressive, hopeful spirit of the nationwide labor teach-in movement nicely, as well as the particular ambiance of the University of Virginia teach-in held at the end of February 1997.
Unfortunately, author Vernon Horn overstates by far my own role in the emergence and propagation of this academic/political phenomenon. I was but one
among many. Steve Fraser, a senior editor at Houghton Mifflin and a well-known historian in his own right, cochaired with me the flagship Columbia teach-in
last October; and at the University of Virginia, indispensable roles were played by Eric Lott and Susan Fraiman of the English Department, Claire Kaplan of the Women’s Center and numerous students and other faculty. Meanwhile labor teach-ins—UCLA, the University of Washington, Cornell, and the University of Wisconsin, among other schools—have been entirely “home grown” affairs, sparked by a new alignment of faculty, students, and local labor leaders who for the first time in more than a generation find that in their joint advocacy of rights of working people they have the makings of an exciting new movement.
Nelson Lichtenstein
Professor of History
University of Virginia