Job Market Stats for the History of Science, Technology, and Medicine

Edit: Looks like I goofed on how to calculate UK-inclusive stats when I first posted this. Up is down over there, lecturer is professor and tenure is as dead as it will be in 10 years in the US! Anyway, it should be correct now (but I'd welcome feedback if not).
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It's nearing the end of the tenure-track portion of the annual job market. We might see one or two more positions, but usually from January onward it's just temporary positions - postdocs, VAPs, lecturer positions, etc.

It's been a rough year. My subjective feeling was that there were far more senior hires than usual, and fewer tenure-track spots. In order to see if I was right, I calculated statistics from the past several years of postings on the Academic Wiki page for the History of Science, Technology, and Medicine: http://academicjobs.wikia.com/wiki/History_of_Science,_Technology,_and_Medicine_2015-2016

For anyone not familiar, the Academic Jobs wiki is a user-generated stream of information about the job market. People post jobs, and update when they hear back (requests for info, interviews, campus visits, offers being made, offers being accepted). It's crucial in a market that seems to thrive on opacity, and where rejection letters, if they ever arrive, may be as much as 12 months past when you applied. Since it's user-generated, it's not truly thorough, but it's probably a good starting point at the least.

Here are statistics for the job market since 2010 (TT stands for Tenure-Track). I'm tossing together all specialties and sub-fields:

Jobs in North America

	2010-11	2011-12	2012-13	2013-14	2014-15	2015-16
Senior	0	3	5	2	1	4
Open	4	7	3	0	1	2
TT	12	23	33	17	25	13
Non-TT	2	5	6	5	4	1

It might make sense to combine Senior/Open Hire searches, since my subjective impression is those very often go for senior hires:

All Jobs in North America, combining Senior/Open

	2010-11	2011-12	2012-13	2013-14	2014-15	2015-16
Senior/Open	4	10	8	2	2	6
TT	12	23	33	17	25	13
Non-TT	2	5	6	5	4	1

Since foreign university systems are pretty different, it's hard to make a direct comparison. Let's make the following approximations:

Fellow = Non-Tenure Track
Lecturer = Tenure-Track Asst. Prof.
Professor = Tenured Prof.

Not a perfect fit, but maybe close enough to see where we are on an international scale:

All Jobs in the History of Science, Technology, and Medicine

	2010-11	2011-12	2012-13	2013-14	2014-15	2015-16
Senior	1	5	5	3	3	8
Open	4	7	4	0	1	2
TT	16	33	42	25	36	18
Non-TT	3	5	7	6	4	1

All Jobs in HistSTM, combining Senior/Open

	2010-211	2011-12	2012-13	2013-14	2014-15	2015-16
Senior/Open	5	12	9	3	4	10
TT	16	33	42	25	36	18
Non-TT	3	5	7	6	4	1

Discussion

As you can see, our "recovery" from the depths of the Great Recession has not been sustained. In fact, we're almost as bad off this year as we were in 2010. If anything, it's likely that data is missing from 2010-11, in which case this year might be the worst for which this data exists.

My suspicion about the aberrant number of senior hires seems to be correct insofar as it's a moderate increase in those and a moderate decrease in tenure-track listings, compared to the last few years in which I've been on the market. Interestingly it's still less than in 2011-12, though.

If we want to get generational-warfare-y, here's the annual difference between TT job listings and senior/open hire listings, in North America:

2010-11: 8

2011-12: 14

2012-13: 25

2013-14: 15

2014-15: 23

2015-16: 7

So, it's a really bad time not to have a job. No news there, but it is actually worse than the past few years. It's good news if you're tenured and looking to move around; it's bad news is you're a department running one of these 6 senior/open searches, since there's much better chance of a failed search.

For reference, Harvard's Department of the History of Science alone lists 46 grad students, 8 postdocs, and 9 visiting faculty. Assuming those grad students are evenly split across the average length of 7 years, that's ~14 Harvard folks on the market next year. They alone could fill up every tenure-track job listed this year in North America, and still have a person or two left over. What a world.

In fact, let's run with this:

Overproduction of HistSTM PhDs, underestimated

(Or, Underproduction of HistSTM Jobs, But That's a Tough Nut to Crack)

Here are a few top programs, just grabbing the number of their History of Science/Tech/Med grad students (ignoring postdocs and VAPs) from department websites:

Harvard	46
MIT	36
Princeton	29
U Penn	28
Johns Hopkins	25
Yale	22
Chicago	11
UC Berkeley	7
Total	204

Estimating 7 years for a degree, that's about 30 PhDs in the history of science each year just from these top programs, probably underestimating.

We average about 21 tenure-track jobs, anywhere in North America, each year.

Even if we assume that there are a half-dozen more jobs each year posted than get listed on the Wiki (which is generous), that's still overproducing PhDs (again, just from these top programs). 

Then there are the dozens, probably hundreds of grad students doing great work at programs outside of these schools, or perhaps in other STS programs at these schools I'm not counting.

Then there's the army of postdocs, VAPs, adjuncts, and others who already have PhDs and are also competing for each of these jobs each year.

That's grim. 

What can be done? Well, we can continue to discourage prospective students, but universities needs to take some responsibility too. Can you really produce more new PhDs each year than there are new jobs in your entire field, around the world, Harvard? It's certainly true that we can and should be pushing alt-ac careers as legitimate and important, but that seems like a stretch to me.

Specifics / Data

Of course, not all jobs are created equal. I haven't tried to split out into categories of prestige, or R1 vs. SLAC. There are also some funny effects of jobs repeating for a few years, presumably because of failed searches. It might make sense to look at the actual job listings, then. Forgive the sloppy copying of names. Repeated entries are for multiple jobs listed at that university:

2015-16

Senior	Open	TT	Non-TT
Nebraska	Cal State East Bay	Cal State Channel Islands	Carnegie Mellon
NYU	MIT	Harvard
Purdue		Harvard
Yale		Mississippi state
Aarhus		Mississippi state
Copenhagen		Penn
Westminster		RIT
York		Southern Connecticut
		UC Davis
		UC Riverside
		UC Riverside
		Washington Univ. in St. Louis
		Waterloo
		Cambridge
		Freiburg
		Korea Advanced Institute of Sci-Tech
		Liverpool
		Nazarbayev

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2014-15

Senior	Open	TT	Non-TT
RPI	UCLA	Bucknell	ASU
Regensburg		Birmingham	Oklahoma Norman
Oxford		Cal SLO	Puget Sound
		Harvard	UCB
		Hopkins
		Kansas Medical Centre
		MSU
		MSU
		MSU
		Northern Kentucky
		Notre Dame
		Ohio Univ.
		Penn
		RIT
		Tennessee Tech
		Tufts
		U Wash Bothel
		UC SC
		UCB
		UCD
		UVA
		Vanderbilt
		VT
		Washington St. L.
		Wesleyan
		Aarhus
		Cambridge
		Kings College
		Leeds
		Leeds
		Nazarbayev
		Swansea
		Sydney
		Warwick
		Yonsei
		York

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2013-14

Senior	Open	TT	Non-TT
Harvard		ASU	Columbia
McMaster		Auburn	NASA
Freiburg		Cal SLO	Rhodes
		Cornell	UCB
		Creighton	Utah St
		Drew	Cambridge
		Drexel
		MIT
		Penn
		San Diego
		Stevens
		Toronto
		Tulane
		UC SB
		Wis-Mad
		Yale
		Bristol
		Cambridge
		Edinburgh
		Exeter
		Kent
		Korea Advanced Institute Sci-Tech
		Oxford
		UC London
		UC London

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2012-13

Senior	Open	TT	Non-TT
Duke	Illinois U-C	CSU Fullerton	MSU
Illinois U-C	MO - Columbia	Alabama	Cal Tech
MIT	NJ Inst. of Tech	Amherst	Duke
Penn	NYU Shanghai	Carlton	MSU
Wichita State		Chicago	MSU
		Cornell	Vanderbilt
		Drew	Imperial London
		Drexel
		Emory
		ETSU
		Farmingdale State
		Harvard
		McMaster
		Montana State
		Northern Arizona
		Penn
		Princeton
		Stanford
		Stanford
		Texas Austin
		U Idaho
		U Pacific
		UNC Wilmington
		UNM
		Vanderbilt
		Vassar
		VCU
		Winnipeg
		Wisc Mad
		Wisconsin - Stevens Point
		Wright State
		Yale
		Bristol
		Cambridge
		Edingburgh
		Kent
		Kings College
		Kings College
		Melbourne
		Tsinghua
		UC London
		Universidad del Roasrio-Bogota

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2011-12

Senior	Open	TT	Non-TT
Johns Hopkins	Maryland Institute College of Art	Drexel	ASU
Penn	Georgia Gwinett	Albany, SUNY	Drexel
Wichita State	Illinois	ASU	National Library of Medicine
Sydney	Rutgers	CUNY - Staten Island	Northwestern
Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona	Texas, Medical Branch	Drexel	NY Academy of Medicine
	Vanderbilt	George Washington
	Yale	Houston
		Johns Hopkins
		Kansas
		Minnesota
		Mississippi State
		Mississippi State
		New Jersey Institute of Tech
		New Mexico - ABQ
		Northwestern
		Puget Sound
		RIT
		Stevens Intitute of Tech
		Texas Austin
		Texas Dallas
		Texas Galveston
		UC Irvine
		Wisconsin-Madison
		Cambridge
		Gottingen
		Hull
		Oxford Brookes
		Queen Mary, Univ. London
		UC London
		UC London
		UC London
		Warwick
		Yonsei [cancelled]

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2010-11

Senior	Open	TT	Non-TT
King's College	Emory	Cornell	Ryerson
	Harvard	Alabama Huntsville	Stanford
	Johns Hopkins	Chicago	Manchester
	Virginia Tech	Dickinson
		Harvey Mudd
		Illinois Institute of Tech
		Minnesota Rochester
		Missouri Univ. of Sci-Tech
		Penn
		Princeton
		RIT
		St. Louis College of Pharmacy
		Cambridge
		Glasgow
		Imperial College London
		Yonsei

Syllabus - History of Espionage in the 20th Century (undergrad)

To round out my posting of syllabi I've been putting together, here is one for an undergraduate lecture course on the History of Espionage in the 20th century. It's appropriate for a variety of possible programs: US and the world, Europe and the world, global history, etc.

The "open-source intelligence" assignment is one I think would be very effective:

Open-source intelligence assignment: As we will be discussing, often times the most reliable sources available to intelligence agencies are the same ones available to the public: newspapers, Internet searches, government documents, court records, etc. Given the advances in information technology and social norms over the past few decades, dealing with too much information (some of it non-obviously incorrect) is one of the biggest challenges intelligence agencies (and historians, and most researchers) face.

In this assignment, you will pretend to be an investigator tasked with finding out information about you. Use Internet searches and any other publicly-available sources to write out a full profile. Try to preserve the illusion that you're starting from nothing but your full name and current address. It's okay (even expected) that your final report will have false information in it, as long as you document where you got this information and why you think it applies. For this assignment, you won't be required to seek out any sources that cost money, require travel, or involve actually interviewing/questioning people, but you should include a description of what steps you would take for further information. Remember that it's important to be thorough in documenting why you come to the conclusions you do.

The dossier about yourself should be at least two pages long (double-spaced), but can be longer. In addition, you must write at least one page of reflection about the process. Things you can consider in this reflection: are you comfortable with the information that is available about you? Is your Internet presence an accurate representation of who you are? What amount of control do you feel you have over what conclusions people investigating you would draw?

I'm still on the fence about how (or whether) to include the extra-credit section:

OPTIONAL extra credit assignment: You can get team up with someone and investigate one another, writing up a dossier. After your investigations, you will exchange dossiers and see what the other person got right and got wrong. You would then write at least one page about reflection about this assignment. The point of this assignment is to see what information is out there that someone can find without your own insider knowledge/bias, and to think through how much control you have over this information.

NOTE: When investigating someone else for the assignment, it's absolutely vital to respect boundaries, to ignore any particular information or topics that the person requests, and otherwise to avoid going too far. In theory this information is publicly available, but there's a real difference between information existing and information being known.

In principle I like that assignment better than the main one. I already know whether a website refers to the correct Doug O'Reagan (a fairly uncommon name), so it's hard to really put myself in the shoes of someone who might be chasing down false leads, coming to incorrect conclusions, guessing at others. Having someone else take a stab at it makes that clear in a new way. Anyone with something they really want to keep private/unknown can simply opt not to do the assignment, which would be for a small amount of extra credit. Even someone not opting to do the assignment could benefit from having really thought through what's out there, and how much/little control we have over our "virtual self."

On the other hand, I could imagine it going wrong if someone ignores the explicit warning about not going too far. I don't want to incentivize any stalking or similar behavior.

One alternative is to have students investigate me, or a public figure like the university president, a congressman, etc., but then you lose the reflexive part of the assignment (what will people get wrong about me if they're using these types of resources, such as future employers?). What information does the NSA have about me, and is that the same thing as the government knowing this information, in a meaningful sense?

I'd be delighted to hear any feedback. It's something I'll certainly mull over before teaching this as-yet-hypothetical course.

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PDF link

History XXX – History of Espionage in the 20^th Century

Spring 2016 | 3 credits

Instructor:

            Douglas Michael O'Reagan

            [Email]

            Office hours: [Office hours]

                                   by appointment, including via Skype/Google Hangouts/email

Lectures/Discussions:  Tuesdays and Thursdays 12:30-2pm, South 130

The United States intelligence community is a regular figure in news stories today, including in Edward Snowden's revelations about the National Security Agency's data collections, rendition and torture by the Central Intelligence Agency, cyberespionage by foreign powers, and worry about how to stop terrorist individuals, groups, and states. Yet as recently as the Second World War, the United States did not even have a permanent, civilian intelligence agency, much less the 17 separate agencies that exist (or sometimes compete) today.

This course addresses the history of espionage in world affairs over the twentieth century, emphasizing American and European (including Russian) history. Questions we will be returning to throughout the course include: What role is there for secret intelligence in a democracy founded on transparency? How can and should we balance privacy and security concerns? How have different nations' institutions and values shaped their use of espionage?

Course Requirements:

Open-source intelligence assignment: As we will be discussing, often times the most reliable sources available to intelligence agencies are the same ones available to the public: newspapers, Internet searches, government documents, court records, etc. Given the advances in information technology and social norms over the past few decades, dealing with too much information (some of it non-obviously incorrect) is one of the biggest challenges intelligence agencies (and historians, and most researchers) face.

In this assignment, you will pretend to be an investigator tasked with finding out information about you. Use Internet searches and any other publicly-available sources to write out a full profile. Try to preserve the illusion that you're starting from nothing but your full name and current address. It's okay (even expected) that your final report will have false information in it, as long as you document where you got this information and why you think it applies. For this assignment, you won't be required to seek out any sources that cost money, require travel, or involve actually interviewing/questioning people, but you should include a description of what steps you would take for further information. Remember that it's important to be thorough in documenting why you come to the conclusions you do.

The dossier about yourself should be at least two pages long (double-spaced), but can be longer. In addition, you must write at least one page of reflection about the process. Things you can consider in this reflection: are you comfortable with the information that is available about you? Is your Internet presence an accurate representation of who you are? What amount of control do you feel you have over what conclusions people investigating you would draw?

OPTIONAL extra credit assignment: You can get team up with someone and investigate one another, writing up a dossier. After your investigations, you will exchange dossiers and see what the other person got right and got wrong. You would then write at least one page about reflection about this assignment. The point of this assignment is to see what information is out there that someone can find without your own insider knowledge/bias, and to think through how much control you have over this information.

NOTE: When investigating someone else for the assignment, it's absolutely vital to respect boundaries, to ignore any particular information or topics that the person requests, and otherwise to avoid going too far. In theory this information is publicly available, but there's a real difference between information existing and information being known.

Lateness policy: All assignments must be turned in by 12pm on their due-date. Any assignments submitted late will lose 2/3 of a grade per day (for example, a B+ becomes a B-, or a B becomes a C+). In exceptional, rare circumstances, you can pre-arrange an extension with me.

Midterm/Final exams - Exams will consist of two sections. In the first section, you will be given a number of key terms or names, and your job will be to define and explain the significance of several of the options, within about 3-5 sentences each. The second section will be a longer essay (or essays). For these essays, you will draw upon lectures, readings, and discussions.

Participation – This includes completing the week's readings in advance, and being ready to discuss them with the rest of the class.

Grading:

            Class Participation (40%)

OSINT investigation paper (10%)

Midterm exam (20%)

Research paper (30%)

Required Texts:

·       Christopher Andrew, For the President's Eyes Only: Secret Intelligence and the American Presidency from Washington to Bush

Recommended Texts:

This class will assume a basic knowledge of American, European, and to some degree world history over the 20^th century. Since many students might feel themselves to be lacking in this area, the following texts are suggestions for helping keep pace and fill in background knowledge. I encourage you to ask questions when you don't know something, but these readings (and even Wikipedia) can also often help.

·        Tony Judt, Postwar: A History of Europe since 1945 – very long, but excellent

·        Mark Mazower, Dark Continent: Europe's Twentieth Century – shorter, but also very well written

·        William Chafe, The Unfinished Journey: America Since World War II.

·        Ellen Schrecker, The Age of McCarthyism: A Brief History With Documents

In addition, the following books are excellent supplements to course information we will be discussing (and are a very short and incomplete list. I'd be happy to provide more recommendations for specific topics):

·        Bamford, The Shadow Factory: The NSA from 9/11 to the Eavesdropping on America

·        Bamford, Body of Secrets: Anatomy of Ultra-Secret National Security Agency

·        Fursenko and Naftali, One Hell of a Gamble: Khrushchev, Castro and Kennedy, 1958-1964

·        Haynes and Klehr, Spies: The Rise and Fall of the KGB in America

·        Haynes and Klehr, Venona: Decoding Soviet Espionage in America

·        Kohnson, The Lavender Scare: The Cold War Persecution of Gays and Lesbians in the Federal Government (2013).

·        Richelson, A Century of Spies: Intelligence in the Twentieth Century.

·        Weinstein and Vassiliev, The Haunted Wood: Soviet Espionage in America: The Stalin Era

Course Readings and Schedule:

Week	Date	Lectures
1	12-Jan	Introduction: Intelligence and Policy Intro
	14-Jan	US through 20th C
		Readings: ·        Andrew 1-29 ·        Aldrich and Andrew, Secret Intelligence: A Reader, Ch. 1-2 (p.1-19) (on Blackboard)
2	19-Jan	World War I Europe through 20th C
	21-Jan	WWI
		Readings: ·        Andrew 30-74 ·        Hiley, "The Failure of British Espionage against Germany, 1907-1914," The Historical Journal, Vol. 26, No. 4 (1983): p.867-889. http://journals.cambridge.org/action/displayAbstract?fromPage=online&aid=3290404 ·        Bradley, "The Russian Secret Service in the First World War," Soviet Studies, Vol. 20, No. 2 (1968): 242-248 (http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/09668136808410649?journalCode=ceas19#.VoW4dhUrKhc)
3	26-Jan	The Interwar Years: Misunderstanding Hitler Interwar: Misunderstanding Hitler
	28-Jan	WWII lead-in, Pearl Harbor
		Readings: ·        Andrew 75-122 ·        David Kahn, "The Intelligence Failure of Pearl Harbor," Foreign Affairs, 70, no. 5 (1992) (https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/japan/1991-12-01/intelligence-failure-pearl-harbor)
4	2-Feb	World War II The Western Front
	4-Feb	The Eastern Front
		Readings: ·        Andrew 123-148 ·        Steury, review of David Murphy, What Stalin Knew: The Enigma of Barbarossa (https://www.cia.gov/library/center-for-the-study-of-intelligence/csi-publications/csi-studies/studies/vol50no1/9_BK_What_Stalin_Knew.htm) ·        Harold Deutsch, "The Historical Impact of Revealing the Ultra Secret" https://www.nsa.gov/public_info/_files/cryptologic_spectrum/ultra_secret.pdf
5	9-Feb	The Early Postwar Searching for German Sci/tech
	11-Feb	The CIA and NSA: Origins and early history
		Readings: ·        Andrew 149-198 ·        NSC 68: United States Objectives and Programs for National Security, April 14, 1950. o   Section on "Possible Courses of Action" http://fas.org/irp/offdocs/nsc-hst/nsc-68-9.htm
6	16-Feb	Soviet Intelligence Abroad Early Soviet intelligence successes, communism as a world philosophy
	18-Feb	Atomic spies, KGB rings in the US
		Readings: ·        Andrew and Mitrokhin, The Mitrokhin Archive: The KGB in Europe and the West, p.1-22 (on Blackboard) ·        Usdin, "The Rosenberg Ring Revealed: Industrial-Scale Conventional and Nuclear Espionage," Journal of Cold War Studies, Vol. 11, No. 3 (2009): 91-143. (http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/cws/summary/v011/11.3.usdin.html)
7	23-Feb	Paranoia, Witch Hunts, and Witches McCarthy, Lavender scare, FBI expands
	25-Feb	MIDTERM
		Readings: ·        Andrew 199-256 ·        Film: Good Night and Good Luck
8	1-Mar	The Politics of Fear Missile Gap, Bomber gap
	3-Mar	U2, spy planes, TECHINT vs HUMINT
		Readings: ·        Andrew 257-306 ·        CIA history of the U-2: http://www2.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB434 ·        Philip Taubman, Secret Empires, p.xi-xvi, 3-34 (on Blackboard)
9	8-Mar	American "Secret" Operations Abroad US in Latin America
	10-Mar	US in East Asia
		Readings: ·        Andrew 307-349 ·        Len Scott, "Espionage and the Cold War: Oleg Penkovsky and the Cuban Missile Crisis," Intelligence and National Security Volume 14, Number 3 (1999): 23-47. PDF
10	15-Mar	Spring Break
	17-Mar
11	22-Mar	KGB and GRU: Soviet Intelligence and State Terror The KGB
	24-Mar	Stasi and other East Bloc nations
		Readings: ·        Naimark, "To Know Everything and to Report Everything Worth Knowing‘: Building the East German Police State, 1945-1949," Cold War International History Project, Working Paper #10, Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, 1992, available online at: www.wilsoncenter.org/topics/pubs/ACFB6.pdf
12	29-Mar	Cold War Espionage Berlin
	31-Mar	Mind Control, MKULTRA, LSD
		Readings: ·        John Le Carre, The Spy Who Came In from the Cold ·        Weiss, "The Farewell Dossier: Duping the Soviets," CIA Studies in Intelligence (https://www.cia.gov/library/center-for-the-study-of-intelligence/csi-publications/csi-studies/studies/96unclass/farewell.htm)
13	5-Apr	Secret Intelligence, Open Society? Church Commission, Vietnam, Watergate
	7-Apr	Collapse of the Soviet Union
		Readings: ·        Andrew 350-424 ·        Church Commission report on mail opening program, pages 1-25 http://www.aarclibrary.org/publib/church/reports/vol4/html/ChurchV4_0003a.htm
14	12-Apr	Brave New World End of the Cold War? Top Secret America
	14-Apr	9/11 and Terrorism
		Readings: ·        Andrew 425-537 ·        9/11 Commission Report (Final report of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States), July 2004 (http://govinfo.library.unt.edu/911/report/index.htm) o   Ch. 11 (Foresight and Hindsight)
15	19-Apr	Evolving Threats Snowden and the NSA
	21-Apr	Corporate espionage and cybercrime
		Readings: ·        James Bamford, "They Know Much More Than You Think," New York Review of Books (http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2013/08/15/nsa-they-know-much-more-you-think/) ·        Kristie Macrakis "Technophilic Hubris and Espionage Styles during the Cold War," Isis, Vol. 101, No. 2 (2010): 378-85. (http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/653104)
16	26-Apr	Reflection and Wrap-up Reflection: What Role for Espionage in an Open Society?
	28-Apr	Wrap-up and review
		Readings: ·        2010 Washington Post articles: http://projects.washingtonpost.com/top-secret-america