So how do I become a history professor?

Factual Questions
1

My apologies if a similar question has been asked before- I searched earlier threads but the questions already asked were more specific than my general query…

I’ve decided to major in European History and I would like to teach it eventually at the college level. So, how do I go about doing that? I have more interest in teaching than in researching, and, in fact, I’d rather avoid the need for constant publication at all. I’m in a community college for now and plan to transfer next year to a UC campus, and then I assume on to graduate school and a PhD. But when do I start teaching? How do I find a job? What do I need to be doing now to improve my future resume? What is an instructor expected to do besides teach classes, in a University of California vs Cal State vs Community College? What kind of salary should I expect before and after tenure? Etc, etc

Just wanted to know the details from others in the field before I commit to another 8 or 9 years of school…

Thanks for any help

2

The general path is the same for most academic departments. You’ll go on to grad school after college. For history it may well be traditional to pull down a master’s degree before moving on to your Ph.D. During this time you’ll likely be put in a T.A. position, moving up to full lecturing capacity by the end of your degree (depending on your individual department).

After your doctoral commencement you move to a series of postdoctoral appointments. The number, if any, depends on your field. I’m looking at one in math, while biologists ca be postdocs the rest of their lives. This is roughly “adjunct professor” or “associate professor”: you do teaching and research to build your name even further.

Eventually you’ll apply for a tenure-track position (“assistant professor”) which, if you do well, will become a tenured position (“full professor”).

3

Oh, I almost forgot: if you’re good, grad school can be relatively easy to get. Postdocs and beyond are “real jobs” and are being squeezed like everybody else these days. I know of at least one person on this board who was aimed straight at academia until he graduated and there were no postdocs available.

Pepto Bismol will be your best friend as your dissertation winds down.

4

Most big public universities are considered research universities, meaning that they expect the full-time faculty to continue doing research through their careers. In my experience, history is a field that’s pretty heavy on publication compared to most of the technical fields, and in my father’s department at least you would generally be expected to have a book in publication before you get considered for a tenure-track position. Most new professors manage to expand their graduate thesis into a book for their first publication.

5

I was in a doctoral program in history at one time. I gave it up and went into business. For a couple of reasons…

  1. I went to grad school after working for a few years. I found I really liked the professors and the learning…but I hated the students. They struck me a sloppy, rude and ineffectual. The corrolary to that is they were exactly like me prior to a few years worth of non-academe making-a-living.

  2. I tried to pitch to my advisors (I had two) a means to apply math to history beyond the traditional statisitcs. They didn’t buy that math could apply in the way I was doing it. But I also saw from their eyes that they just weren’t interested in the math like I was.

  3. I learned that during my first year in the program there were…nationally…a grand total of five (5!!!) openings for a tenure track position in history. That spells doom.

I don’t want to discourage you…but it’s a difficult road to hoe. I’d still say that teaching (outside of the competitive tenure-track thing) would be a fun retirement career…say at a community college after I’m retired and have the kids out of college. It would be fun. But as a career in which mine and my family depend? I think I made the right choice.

6

I’ll bite.

7

Mathochist gave a pretty good overview of the process. I have done graduate studies in history, and several of my fellow students have gone on to finish their doctorates and look for work. (I also started in a California community college, so I really felt obliged to give add my two cents, having once been in your shoes.)

Be aware that research is an essential part of academic employment. The thing that really distinguishes university professors from high school teachers is the depth of knowledge in specific fields – that depth can only be acquired through original research. (No slight intended toward H.S. teachers, of course) You’ll find that, as a rule of thumb, the more highly regarded the school, the more pressure professors will have to research and publish.

Keep in mind that you are entering a very competitive field. Frankly, my friends have had a tough time getting teaching jobs in history. (We all went to a British university, and they have been trying to get jobs in American universities — it’s a very tough transition to make.)

Two essential things you can be doing right now: concentrate on getting good grades. If you can get into top grad schools, it is easier to get a job after graduating. A PhD from Berkeley is a hell of a lot better than one from a CSU – I can’t emphasize this enough.

The other thing is start doing concerted studies of languages relating to the historical topics you’re interested in. You’ll almost certainly be expected to have reading knowledge, if not fluency, in two languages before you are allowed to get your PhD. I would urge you to arm yourself with at least one difficult language, so long as its appropriate to what you wish to study. Anyone can learn French and German, but having German and Polish, or better yet, Serbo-Croatian and Russian, will make it easier for you to distinguish yourself in the field. (Of course, travel to these places will be essential to learning the languages well.)

Best of luck to you, and hope you persevere.

Or, as Bill said in the Sun Also Rises, “Never be daunted. Secret of my success – never been daunted.”

8

Note: The US standard is Assistant -> Associate (tenured) -> Full. There is some variation, but Associate is almost always tenured. (But I was a variation: 6 years untenured Associate once. Ick.)

Non-tenure track titles can be of many forms: Instructor, Lecturer, Research Associate, Visiting Prof., etc.

While there are no hard rules about this, every Adjunct Prof. I’ve ever known was a real professor somewhere else, e.g, in another dept. or at a nearby college. It was considered purely a courtesy title with no formal obligations.

If you’re department is not well rated in its field, e.g., not in the top 50, chances are only lip service is paid to requiring research, and teaching is what counts for most people. But even at such a school, being a decent teacher and bringing in research $ really elevates your status.

9

It seems possible, from the phrasing of the original question, that the OP might prefer (or at least, might be interested in considering) a position at a Community College. Most of the answers seem to be slanted toward what one needs to do to obtain a tenure-track position at a four-year college. My field isn’t typically offered at the two-year college level, so can someone else speak to the relative requirements for and availability of CC history faculty positions?

Well, now you know an exception. I’m an adjunct faculty member at a local university; I teach a night course twice a week, and I’m not associated with any other colleges. This particular school caters to non-traditional students taking classes after work, so they hire quite a number of adjunct faculty in all disciplines to teach one or two night courses. Many are from industry, as I am.

10

Oh, couple other things:

  1. Welcome to the Straight Dope, brett3570, and thanks for your support!

Back in grad school, when I was serious about wanting a tenure-track position, I attended a “how-to” seminar put on by the Graduate College. Calibrating supply and demand in your field was one topic, since demand will vary widely from major to major. Worst case: the previous year, there was a total of one opening in anthropology. One.

11

You might be interested in the blog Invisible Adjunct (http://www.invisibleadjunct.com). The author has a Ph.D. in history and works as an adjunct (read: part-time teacher at a college for very little money). She writes about the difficulty of finding academic work. Actually, she recently quit academia and decided to find a job elsewhere after her latest job search turned up nothing. It seems that universities are hiring more adjuncts and fewer tenure-track professors, especially in fields like history, since they can dump 3-4 undergrad courses per semester on an adjunct and pay them much less, while full professors are unwilling to teach undergrad courses and make a lot more money.

12

I’m basically going by the three institutions I’m most familiar with: Two schools in the University of Maryland System and Yale University. Really, I haven’t noticed a standard, which is why I said “roughly”. If there is and I’ve misinterpreted it, well I never did pay as much attention to the politics as to the actual research.

13

Good luck finding a job in that field in California! I don’t want to rain on anybody’s parade, but California has a glut of mammoth proportions when it comes to Liberal Arts PhDs who want to teach. If you don’t have very specific knowledge in an area that a college just happens to have an opening in, forget it. If teaching European History is your dream, then plan on teaching AP Euro to high-school students, or plan on living someplace other than California. Montana maybe? :smiley:

14

Agreed. I’m not sure whether it’s “right” or not, but I’m going to have a far easier time getting a postdoc given that I’m coming out of Yale than someone coming out of, say, my undergraduate alma mater: the University of MD, College Park. This would be true even if our dissertations were of the exact same quality.

Partially, where you go leaves impressions of who you’ve worked with. Some people write applets to draw the Mandelbrot set while others ask the man about it over after-dinner drinks. “Right” or not, name-dropping is part of politics and politics helps.

The other part is that the “top” schools are recognized as such and they get many, many applications. They get first pick of the best students. They also can be harder on their students. College Park grad students (in math, at least) can take as long as they want to pass their qualifying exams. Partly this is because the students hang around and provide plenty of teaching staff, which they used to really need. Still, to this day there are students that professors will tell you candidly have no shot of ever passing their quals, but are allowed to stay on. At Yale, however, you must pass all three exams (including one that’s a grueling eight hours) within your first two years or you’re out. If you attempt a test and get a low enough grade, you’re out on the spot. If someone can survive that kind of sadism, they must be pretty resiliant, which will help when dealing with todays undergrads.

15

Do you actively dislike research and writing, brett3570, or do you just think you’d enjoy teaching more? As Ravenman points out, some research and writing is absolutely essential. At my university, the history professors mainly focused on teaching, but they were all also working on various research/book projects. If you can’t stand research, you may want think hard about going into academia.

Others have mentioned how competitive the field is. How much and how often are you willing to relocate for a position? Think about how that might affect a spouse/future relationships. One reason why I chose not to pursue a Ph.D is that I wasn’t willing to ask my husband to follow me around the country as I searched for a tenure-track position.

I love research and teaching, and in an alternate universe I’d happily be working on my dissertation right now. But I’m not willing to make the sacrifices necessary to succeed in academia.

I hope this thread isn’t too discouraging, brett, but rather that it helps you make choices with your eyes eide open.

16

Thanks everyone for your advice…

It’s not that I actively dislike research and writing, I would just prefer to emphasize teaching- I know that there will be a lot of research involved in getting my Master’s and PhD, but I don’t want to be primarily a researcher/writer. I have friends who complain that they meet their teachers on the first day of class and then the class is handled from then on by TA’s because their professor is off researching. I want to teach as a career and I really don’t have much of an interest in high school- I’m open toteaching community college. I talked to my European History professor at my school and asked him some very general questions, and he didn’t make it sound nearly as difficult to find a job as I had expected. Maybe he’s an exception, but he was tenured, I think, around 30 (he’s now 37 or so) and will make around $100k this year. His job sounds very appealing, but has the job market changed that substantially in the last 10 years? Has academia always been this competitive? I really want to do this, but are my chances of becoming a tenured, full-time professor slim?

17

I strongly recommend you follow carterba’s advice and read that blog. I worked at two different large universities in the midwest (one of them in the “top 100 research universities”, the other merely a regional school; both with enrollments >30k), and watched/helped with a number of faculty “searches”. I can tell you without hope of contradiction that you have no prayer of getting a position as a history professor at a CA university, and probably not at a junior college there, either, as CA is the most oversupplied with Ph.D.s of all the states. Harry Turtledove (a well-known SF&F writer) is probably the most famous history Ph.D. in California, and he eventually gave up looking for an academic position. He earns his living as a fiction writer.

In any state, there are far more applicants than positions, particularly in the social sciences (as history is sometimes classified) and “letters” (English, etc.). I would apply to junior colleges (assuming you do continue and complete the Piled Higher and Deeper) and to private schools.

Good luck; you’ll need it.

18

Excuse me for saying but the idea of wanting to get a PhD and deciding you only want to teach before you’ve even started is a very bad sign.

Anybody who wants to get a PhD should have enough interest in their field that they plan on doing research in that field no matter what. (At least they should start out that way.) Actually the very idea is somewhat oxymoronic in nature.

Of course the reality down the road is that obstacles might come about that cause you to settle for just teaching. But to only want to teach in the first place suggests that you have no business going for a PhD in the first place.

If you go for a PhD anyway, I wonder that you might have a miserable time seeing as you are not interested in the subject enough to want to perform life long research.

This has been my experience anyway. Actually I already had my masters degree before I finally became interested enough in my field to want to perform life long research. (I didn’t really enjoy my field until then.)

19

Anybody who wants to get a PhD should have enough interest in their field that they plan on doing research in that field no matter what. (At least they should start out that way.) Actually the very idea is somewhat oxymoronic in nature.

I agree, to an extent. But even at Junior College, in which research is limited, a PhD is pretty much a given requisite for employment, isn’t it? Especially as there is an overabundance of PhDs in California and presumably in other states as well. I don’t really care about being in a top research university; I had assumed Junior College was more for me anyhow.

*If you go for a PhD anyway, I wonder that you might have a miserable time seeing as you are not interested in the subject enough to want to perform life long research. *

But what is wrong with wanting to teach? Is it really such a shallow goal to want to lecture? I can’t think of anything more enjoyable than talking about the Roman Inquisition and the English Civil War and Italian unification all day, and I can’t imagine that there isn’t anyone in academia who shares my sentiments. There must be some out there who are primarily interested in teaching.

I can hardly say that this has been encouraging, but I’d hate to have to switch my major this late in the game.

20

If you are interested in teaching only at the junior college level, I would not say that a PhD is absolutely essential. Two of my above-referenced fellow students found jobs teaching at a community college in northern Virginia with only masters degrees.

I also seem to recollect that, when I attended a community college in California, something like half of my instructors had PhDs – the rest had only masters’ degrees, or they were working on PhDs.

If you are more intent on teaching at the community college level, I think going to a CSU would suit your goals just fine.