Given the high production of humanities doctorates in recent years, against a dwindling university job market, the number of graduates now working outside of academia must be very high. The National Research Council reports that over 30,000 doctorates have been awarded each year since the early 1980s. Studies have projected only 100,000 available academic positions between 1980 and 1995, and one source has calculated that there are eight doctorates available for each faculty position. [See also “A Look at Recent Humanities Doctorates,” Perspectives, Jan. ’86, p. 16.] The prospect of a Biblical scholar becoming a sales trainee for IBM or an English doctorate designing courses for fire fighters and writing technical manuals has not now become so unusual.
These scholars pursuing careers outside a college environment constitute a new direction for graduate work—an “outside profession.” Exact numbers and situations are difficult to construct because of the multitude of alternate careers. In not pursuing an academic life, outside professionals often lose contact with their graduate departments and scholarly activities. Yet their number, in all probability, must well exceed those hired into university positions for the past ten years. Such a significant percentage of trained scholars in other livelihoods should not be just a grim example of an overproduction of doctoral students. Rather, they demonstrate potentially imaginative and fruitful new occupational directions and also become real contributors to academic values.
Several fortunate humanities doctorates have found real opportunities, not to mention better salaries, in work out side academia. History of science doctorates, for example, can do research on social and medical problems for leading figures in medicine. Scholars versed in institutional studies may profile political and social events in countries for companies thinking of doing business there.
By far the most promising concept has been the growth of public history programs. The development of records management and institutional histories for banks, law firms, and corporations is a useful and vital function, comparable to the much longer established government history projects. Growing in respectability, such positions also help bridge the too distant gap between the academic and business worlds. These jobs are far too few for the number of applicants, but they at least constitute a potential area of professional activity.
Beyond these immediate and direct contributions, these outside professionals also have some real social impact. They tend to bring a liberal influence with them into the business world. Their concern for human values and the larger meaning of life over financial and technical needs should have a positive impact. Growing corporate concern for urban amenities, physical well-being, and overall quality of life for employees may reflect some of this influence. Increasing noon-time lectures, concerts, and performances demonstrate more in the business environment diversions that once seemed only to belong in a university setting. Certainly in administrative and personnel shifts, a group scarred by their own painful career moves can bring a special sensitivity and understanding.
On the other hand, the feature of intellectual alienation among those most embittered by the academic job crisis could lead to radical and even revolutionary political manifestations. The late historian Crane Brinton in his classic work, Anatomy of Revolution, develops this phenomenon as a prerequisite to political upheaval. Brinton’s examples of intellectual alienation occurred in traditional societies with few employment avenues for intellectuals beyond the ministry or limited educational establishment. They did not occur, as does the present phenomenon, in a modern economy with broad and innovative career options.
Furthermore, Brinton is careful to delineate intellectual alienation with government, rather than society in general, as a prerequisite. While anger may exist at the crisis of nerve in the academic profession itself, few disaffected intellectuals have blamed government for their plight. This manifestation of the outside profession’s impact does not seem a major one.
What seems more common is that people change upon leaving the more liberal academic community for the more conservative business world. The broader experience seems to make them more conservative. In place of those materialistic, shallow Babbits anticipated in business, a new image emerges of hard-working family men and women, concerned and involved in their communities. Accommodation and adjustment seem more characteristic than harsh defiance.
Illustrating these positive examples of professionalism is not to obscure the real hardship and frustration many have experienced. Those still wishing to pursue personal scholarly research or teaching find this very difficult, if not impossible, in face of family and new career responsibilities. Those thinking of a renewed academic calling later in life must consider the probability that good jobs will go to the young and that they may be reluctant to give up active, alternate careers with their own types of fulfillment.
The problem of the permanent loss in original scholarship and teaching for the academic world is no less significant. A generation touched by the Vietnam war and Watergate, imbued with a strong social consciousness and sense of demographics, might have built on these special experiences to contribute whole new understanding of institutions and social movements. Excepting those few fortunate enough to secure teaching posts, the majority of that generation have had to display their talents and interests elsewhere.
Yet in making these transitions, this outside profession has not only shown courage and realism, but made itself a serious contributor in a flawed, but certainly not degenerate society. A group so new and numerous will certainly have an influence more remarkable than yet apparent. Surely, traditional academic professionals, who have done so much to restore a dignified history for blacks, women, and other members of society cannot forget its membership. In cultivating its own qualities and interests in exciting new forums, the outside profession will not constitute a lost generation of scholars, but discoverers and donors in their own way to the high values in which they were trained.
James Herzberg has a PhD in history and is an attorney in Houston, Texas.
