Monday, January 18, 2016

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
______________________________________________________________________
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
______________________________________________________________________
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
______________________________________________________________________
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
______________________________________________________________________
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]
______________________________________________________________________
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

Friday, January 1, 2016

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 20th 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 20th 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