 All right. Heather Nathan's needs no fancy bio, and when I asked if she wanted one, she said, really? So, Heather Nathan's. So, I'll be speaking for just about half an hour. I'd just like to give people a time to keep in mind, just so they know. And I want to start by thanking Noe for organizing this gathering, and by acknowledging Reza and Emma for all their hard work at making things run so smoothly behind the scenes. I also want to thank our graduate deans, Bob Cook and Sarah Herschel for their tireless support of our program. I've been to all three of the past convenings of the Directors of Graduate Studies ever since Esther Kim Lee created the first one back in 2009, and that meeting was inspirational, and it really helped to launch the creation of the new paradigms in graduate education for the American Society for Theatre Research, as well as numerous conversations across the field. And my comments today will be drawn from part of an article that a group of colleagues and I are working on about what comes next in graduate education. And I know that the challenge of what comes next is something that haunts us. It haunts both us and our doctoral students alike when, particularly when we're confronting a job market that has changed as radically as ours has since 2008. Beginning in 2016, a group of colleagues from numerous institutions undertook an investigation of what comes next in doctoral training. And that group includes Jonathan Chambers, Aero Lane, Kat Leiter, Diana Looser, Beth Osborne, Danielle Ross Valley, Kristen Wright, and me. And our goal was to document the current state of the field from the perspective of those colleagues actually enmeshed in the process of graduate programs and job hunts, to solicit examples of best practices, to examine what has changed over the past several years, and to offer recommendations for the future based on the collective wisdom of those that we surveyed. Noe's research, which he shared yesterday, provides an incredibly detailed picture of the job market in terms of jobs available and placement rates, and I hope that our work, which focuses on the experiences of those in the trenches, will offer a useful compliment to his study. So, we started our research with the assumption that all graduate faculty, particularly graduate directors, care deeply about their graduate students and their success. We also acknowledge the challenges that faculty members face in increased demands for institutional and professional services these days, and that the one resource we are all lacking is time to rethink our curriculum and our training and to do new research on the job market and to implement new programs. And yet, what could be more important in ensuring the future of our profession than undertaking meaningful changes to our graduate training that launch students towards successful and fulfilling careers and smoothing the path for those on the job market? For the past decade, Ph.D. programs and theater and performance studies have wrestled with how to prepare students to make substantive contributions to new scholarship and to enjoy rewarding careers in a fundamentally transformed academic landscape. Past models that envision the graduate student to tenure stream as a professor arc have given way to frustratingly long periods spent in contingent labor positions, significant student debt, and shrinking scholarly output from colleagues struggling to balance their multiple part-time jobs without institutional support for their research. As part of our process, we circulated two surveys, which netted 548 responses, and we conducted over 40 interviews in person via Skype, phone, and email with current graduate students, recent graduates, and seasoned professionals. We reviewed doctoral program websites and gathered data by the Strategic National Arts Alumni Project, also known as SNAP. We also turned to information collected in previous surveys by the New Paradigms Committee and the Working Conditions Task Forces of ASTR and ATHA. Some of you may have seen, we've presented updates from our research at ATHA in 2017 and 2018, and then we incorporated audience feedback from those sessions into our work as well. The results reflect both the challenging realities that so many of our colleagues face today, as well as possible directions for the future. In our interviews and through our surveys, we heard praise for graduate programs or organizations that have responded creatively to tenure stream job shortages. We heard frustration from those who perceived themselves as part of a lost generation of scholars, stranded in low paying and or part-time jobs. And we spoke to colleagues whose hopes of pursuing an ALT-AC career were hampered by the fear, we heard about earlier today and yesterday, that they would be letting down their PhD program if they moved beyond the Academy. We also heard from those graduates who found potential paths to ALT-AC challenging to navigate because their PhD provided no clear route to those opportunities beyond the Academy. We saw survey results that reflected a disturbing pattern in scholarly output among contingent faculty, suggesting that while more than 90% managed to continue producing conference papers, fewer than half that number were able to generate book proposals or monographs, a figure that points to a potentially devastating drop in new voices in the field, particularly from colleagues who may identify as members of minoritarian communities. We also encountered creative new models for graduate training that opened a wider range of professional opportunities. And what became clear through our research, and I think what we are all acknowledging, is that the time for incremental change or waiting for the market to improve is long past. While programs and professional organizations may and should continue to advocate for the creation of tenure stream positions over reliance on contingent labor, a dramatic shift back to a former model seems highly unlikely for institutions that can hire up to 30 adjunct faculty members for the cost of one full-time tenure stream position. We spoke to interviewees who reported that the faculty at their institutions consisted of at least 50% non-tenure stream faculty. For almost a decade, the question has been how graduate programs can create proactive, rather than reactive responses to the new normal in the field of theater and performance studies. As one of our interviewees said, we need to get out in front of the placement problem instead of chasing it. Yet for many of the colleagues who responded to our surveys and interview requests, efforts at change have often seemed slow and small and vague. As one interviewee commented, universities are being forced to transform their expectations for graduate programs but haven't yet figured out what to do, suggesting that while faculty leaders are often compassionate about the challenges of the job market, they lack the perspective to overhaul training programs or professional connections to launch students into alternative careers. Other interviewees observed that their faculty mentors may encourage, that was a word we heard a lot, encourage them to pursue career options beyond the academy, but that they're not shown the way and that they're missing the next steps that would help them think creatively about the diverse ways in which they might apply their degree. They spoke of the need to begin planning for multiple career options early in their training, not in the dissertation phase when it may be too late. Again, something we've heard more than once this weekend. We hope that the findings from our research will help generate substantive changes in our doctoral programs and scholarly organizations. We have a responsibility to help our students and colleagues create meaningful careers, whether those lie within or beyond the academy. And we want to continue to diversify the field and make it as inclusive and welcoming as possible so that the future of our discipline will be a rich and representative one. And we hope that these recommendations, called from hundreds of members of the profession, will offer useful guidance in responding to that urgent question of what comes next in graduate education. Section one, what do the numbers suggest? So many colleagues, everyone in this room, I think, can tell horror stories of their own or friends' job searches. Others can recount tales of triumph and placement in dream jobs, yet the isolated anecdotes reveal only part of the story. During our research, we sought opportunities to capture a fuller picture of the current state of the profession. As I mentioned, we conducted two separate surveys. We received a total of 548 responses. And as part of the surveys, we asked colleagues to identify the amount of time that they had spent on the job market, seeking a tenure-stream job, and the amount of time that they had spent in contingent labor positions. As you can see, 65% of respondents had held, or were holding, positions as contingent faculty. 59.8, so really that's 60%, percent of respondents had worked in contingent positions in the past 10 years. 53.9 have worked or currently work at multiple institutions. Only 33% of contingent faculty were covered by a union. The average time for a recent PhD on the tenure-stream job market is 2.6 years, and the average time for PhDs on the contingent labor track is 4.5 years. And the difference between time on the market for a tenure-track job and time spent as a contingent labor seems to indicate that there are a number of individuals working permanently or semi-permanently on the contingent labor force, essentially leaving the full-time tenure-track market. As Jonathan Cramnick, English professor at Yale University, notes in the Chronicle of Higher Education, the window between a doctorate start, excuse me, between a doctorate and the start of a tenure-track job has elongated in some cases to nearly the length of time that assistant professors spend on the tenure-track before they go up for promotion. We also invited survey respondents to share the number of job applications that they sent out per year, and those ranged from one to more than 150 in some cases. When clustered by stage of degree and debt level, stage of career and debt level, potential patterns begin to emerge. Early career applicants, those who received their degrees within the last five years, sent an average of 10 applications per year. Those in the high-debt group, so over 50,000 in student debt, and some people return feedback in our survey, 50,000 is too low. Why didn't you ask about 100,000-plus in student debt? Are sending out more per year. Those currently working in contingent labor positions sent out nine per year, and as I say, we did get some reporting over 150 per year. But perhaps what's most telling about those figures are the ways in which the potential applicant pool for any position increases the longer each candidate remains on the market, and as new generations of PhDs enter an approximately four-year cycle of applying for jobs. Interestingly, while one of our interviewees argued that the profession needs to broaden its definition of what constitutes success in job placement, observing that non-tenure track teaching is still university teaching, and that we weren't either claiming that or giving people credit for it. And they noted that colleagues in contingent labor positions should not be seen as failures in limbo as though they were those embarrassing cousins described at a family reunion as still finding themselves. Knowing that few contingent positions include financial support for faculty research travel or to take time away from work to focus on writing, we also sought information about the types of presentation and publication opportunities that colleagues were able to pursue on the contingent track. Our survey responses approximately 93, well, really 94%, have given a conference presentation since acquiring the degree. 84.16%, 84, have published at least one article, although that may have included articles that they published during their time in graduate school. And then you see the drop. 50% approximately have been able to create a book proposal. 39%, close to 40%, of volume, only 29% have produced a manuscript or a monograph. While part of the issue may be the absence of institutional research funding combined with a significant workload, especially for those working in contingent positions at multiple institutions, the lack of mentorship that most contingent faculty experience cannot be overlooked for most contingent positions. And since contingent faculty seldom have access to the kind of mentorship that tenure stream faculty are given, they may find themselves without sustained support to encourage them towards publication and on an even more basic level they may lack a local intellectual community that values their research. In contrast to the findings about publication progress, 59% of our survey respondents reported participating in a professional theater production, while holding a contingent labor position. That suggests that PhDs are almost twice as likely to participate in a production as they are to publish a monograph, post-degree. And while this may seem surprising in light of the training that PhDs receive in their programs, it becomes less so when one considers the time, effort, and institutional support required to produce a monograph in comparison to working on a show. Productions may also offer a sense of community, emotional payoff, and more immediate results than the isolated process of writing and the delayed gratification of a publication. Also, factoring in that many recent job ads require or give preference to those with some level of artistic experience and the idea that for many institutions publications only count once starts, it perhaps makes sense that those searching for jobs would seek out productions as a way of bolstering their experience and their CV rather than pushing a book towards publication. Section 2, how long can you wait? Contingent colleagues often struggle with job insecurity, lower incomes, a lack of university-supported health insurance. Thus, as we've acknowledged throughout this weekend, there may come a time when basic human needs overtake the ability to wait it out in the hunt for a tenure-stream job. Approximately 60% of the people we surveyed say that they could see themselves transitioning to work beyond the academy. 41% said they were already there. They were already applying to both academic jobs and ALT-AC positions. And as you could see, it rose with those who had extreme debt. 78% of those people said they could see themselves transitioning to the field. And then only 52% of those with low to no debt said they could see themselves transitioning. For our respondents, the largest factor in determining whether they transitioned off the market was the instability of their current position. And you know if you have colleagues who are contingent labor and are not unionized, it is literally a semester-to-semester gig. The second largest factor was time on the market with a distinct population claiming they could move off the academic market if they couldn't find something within five years. Combined with the troubling responses about the low percentage of contingent faculty the developed book projects, this potential exodus from the field underscores that theater and performance studies may be in danger of losing new voices and new contributions to the discipline. Section 3 How to prepare candidates for future success While conferences, presentations, publications, and exciting research projects have long been critical elements of a competitive CV our surveys and conversations with colleagues navigating the current job market suggested that candidates now need more to stand out among a larger and larger pool of applicants. Both the surveys and the interviews that we did make clear the importance of production practice to job placement, specifically the ability to participate in the production program and to teach performance and in some cases even design classes. Those who have practical theater experience our survey showed have a nearly two-thirds advantage over those who do not. While other factors almost certainly play a role in these figures, the role of theater practice in the training of PhD students is not something that we can ignore particularly if we're preparing generalists who may teach at smaller institutions where they may be called upon to juggle multiple responsibilities in their department's programs. So in our survey 84.92 also known as 85% of the respondents claimed that they had had practical theater training prior to their PhD and the same number again if you round it up stated that this was helpful in their current or past jobs. No way study of the academic job market shows a similar trend particularly in positions in small liberal arts colleges and community colleges where a single faculty member might be expected to teach theater history play analysis, acting, director production and maybe do something else. Interviewees who participated in our study who had continued their theater practice, especially in directing and acting, noted that these skills were particularly helpful in the job market. As one interviewee noted, hiring committees in theater departments are frequently dominated by theater practitioners, so theater scholars need to learn to speak that language and to be able to contribute to the program. One of our interviewees reported that they were part of a tiny faculty in which they not only served as the resident PhD, but also as the designer, choreographer and box office manager. Our traditional doctoral training often doesn't prepare our students for the immediate needs of jobs that ask for demonstrated practical skills in directing, acting, designing or other production experience. Our students need portfolios of current creative work, not work that's five or six years old that predates their time in the PhD program. They need mentoring experiences that they can discuss with hiring committees and language that demonstrates a commitment to working with BFA and MFA students and faculty. Those without recent creative portfolios run the risk of being cut in the first round for institutions that might be hiring recent graduates. Yet, many of our interviewees responded that while they might have been encouraged and I'm putting that in air quotes because it was the word that was most frequently used to gain production experience during their PhD programs, their course structure offered few, if any, opportunities to build their CVs in that area. I would also argue, I think we would also argue that part of the problem lies in the way in which many job applications are being written, job descriptions are being written with the tacit assumption that PhDs be both scholars and artists but that the art happens magically outside the PhD process. That assumption ignores the fact that students may have as Darcy was saying, familial responsibilities or financial restrictions that preclude them spending what little free time they have outside of graduate school accumulating professional theater credits. So how can training programs recalibrate their curricula to provide meaningful support and training opportunities for those graduate students who might be wanting to pursue production opportunities. And on the flip side, how can those who are writing job posting descriptions manage their expectations so that they understand that someone who has just spent five or six years earning a PhD might not also had time to develop a substantial professional theater resume. We would contrast the assumptions that are evident in job ads about people's professional and scholarly training with the responses we received in our surveys. When asked how did your degree prepare you for the academic job market the majority said that they had been given opportunities to teach so that was a very high return. 54% reported opportunities to participate in creative programming 40% administrative service for people who might be interested in advising or learning about assessment, grant writing only 19% or 20% described opportunities for work beyond graduate programs such as internships. A 2015 study by the Chronicle of Higher Education across multiple fields contends that PhDs in the humanities are most marketable in their final year of the PhD program. This suggests that the professional development that students receive in their graduate programs particularly in those final two or three years as they prepare to go out on the job market is critical to their success and yet our data from surveys and interviews suggests that professional development is often sporadic, informal and or driven only by one or two faculty members offering workshops and colloquia rather than being something embedded in the program. Some programs and some professors the people in this room work intensely and carefully with their students while others do not. Worse, our interviews demonstrate that while faculty may be well-meaning many are out of touch with the realities of the current job market and they're not able to help students prepare for what they're going to face. While over 90% of our survey respondents said their programs prepared them for the academic job market by offering them opportunities to teach, further exploration of this subject during interviews showed that only some programs included formal pedagogy training and many subjects felt that they would have profited from additional support in the teaching process both for traditional theater courses or studio courses like acting or directing. I'm sure many other universities offer teaching certification programs through the university or graduate school which will appear on a student's transcript but these require additional coursework and projects. Some universities like the University of Pittsburgh, University of Maryland, Tufts, offer and again I'm sure many others offer a course in theater pedagogy that all graduate assistants are required to take in their first year. Others offer more informal training such as periodic workshops and others offer little or no training and simply put graduate students in the classroom and wish them well. Multiple interviewees pointed to this as a clear area where more formalized training would have been helpful starting at the beginning of their time as teachers and continuing with ongoing mentoring, observation and feedback each semester. In other areas our interviews and surveys reveal a sharp decline in sustained programmatic professional development when asked how did your degree program prepare you for the academic job market in our 2018 survey only 58% of the respondents cited opportunities to network with professionals in the field and this may point to a need that is very low-hanging fruit. The need for faculty to remember how important it is to help graduate students network at conferences with introductions to mid-level and senior scholars and also to help ensure that graduate students can attend conferences by advocating for additional travel funding. With only 19.7% of our respondents reporting opportunities for training in the ALT Act work and graduate programs, our survey results also point to a clear need for attention to a more diverse range of professional development opportunities. Interviewees suggested ongoing training and how to talk about one's experience in ways that would be resonant or legible to people in other fields or professions perhaps using resources in the graduate school or career center to anchor that process. They suggested instituting intensive writing workshops or assignments again, things we've talked about this weekend that challenge students to write in a variety of genres including grant writing, writing for a popular audience and other types of proposals so that they had the experience of writing for different audiences rather than only academics. They also emphasized that it was important that these not be add-on experiences but embedded in their training. Interviewees also emphasized that professional development cannot end when students graduate particularly when so many of them now spend years as contingent laborers. Part of our task must be to help our students make the transition to the next stage in their careers whether that is to tenure stream faculty positions a non-tenure stream but permanent faculty position, an admin position a theater, a non-profit wherever they want to go. Relatively simple and low cost measures that have already been brought up this weekend like access to the career center resources or helping them maintain access to their libraries databases could help students continue to navigate career transitions more smoothly. And we have to continue to advocate network, write recommendation letters create community and offer opportunities for our graduates. As our interviews have shown repeatedly the job market is emotionally devastating for our students. Some interviewees wept during our conversations with them. Some reported feeling lost or forgotten and our students need our support. Section four. So what can we do? We go back to our starting premise that all faculty want their students to be successful. So if that's our premise how do we get there? So we called the following recommendations from our surveys and interviews and the first was for graduate students. And I'm sorry if it's too small to read. Is it too small to read? There we go. We'll go through it. So make mentorship on the job market. The expectation of every faculty member. That was something that just came up in our conversation. Not just a few. And this is particularly vital for students from traditionally underrepresented communities and for faculty from traditionally underrepresented groups who often bear an increased mentorship burden. Outreach and networking with department alumni who have gone on to enjoy successful Alt-Act careers, modeling those possibilities as legitimate pathways being proud to announce their achievements instead of as we were talking about earlier today recognizing only those people who got conventional academic jobs. Changing the departmental culture around the job market. Survey students and faculty so it's and faculty about the areas in which they most need training and support. Build professional development programs that respond to those needs. Create an institutional framework for career development events so they are embedded in your academic calendars and so that there is a clear expectation of attendance on the part of all students and faculty. And I think Dacia's point about making sure that it's not at a time when people can't come, right? If they have family responsibilities at home is critical. Offer workshops for faculty not just students on how the job market has changed new job search methods opportunities for Alt-Act careers help faculty learn those key terms that need to be included in letters of recommendation for Alt-Act opportunities or how to prep competitive CVs provide resources after graduation that cost the institution very little library and database access as well as career center resources for contingent colleagues create opportunities for conversation and mentorship schedule times to observe contingent colleagues classes as well as follow-up conversations about their teaching and document those meetings for future letters of recommendation host a brown bag lunch for contingent faculty to present their research to students and faculty colleagues take advantage of the new gas and lunch money program supported by ASTR ATDS and ATHA ask me about it afterwards to gather your local contingent faculty for shared one day mini conferences on research and mentoring this is critical for people who make $2,000 a semester for teaching a class how much does it cost to go to ATHA? Yeah, exactly. So something they could drive to that's free provide basic needs such as a dedicated workspace even if it's shared a campus mailbox department stationary access to a department computer and printer inclusion on a departmental listserv some of our interviewees reported lacking even these fundamental props of professionalism invite contingent colleagues to departmental events and take advantage of any institutional memberships in national organizations such as ASTR or ATHA or subscriptions to art search make sure that they know how to use that too. If you're a publishing scholar introduce them to your editors whether it's by email or at a conference and then I would in bold and bigger there claim them as colleagues at professional conferences and in settings around the university or in your departmental newsletters or websites tout what they do they are part of your faculty. So the 23 pages of the findings I've shared here represent only part of our groups research over the past months we are looking forward to sharing even more of our results in a forthcoming essay even as we acknowledge that they are only part of an ongoing and vital conversation about the future of a field to which we're all so passionately committed I'll be glad to answer any questions I can hear and to invite Aaron John also to come and join me because we are all so excited to be here. Thank you. If there are questions I'll invite people to use the mic because we're live streaming also make sure you say your name before you speak. Just a quick question I'm Marcus just a quick question take into account your point about the decreasing percentage of tenor track jobs and that the way that that's not expected to change and also non tenor track job non tenor track jobs just how we're defining that term contingent I mean one of the things that I've seen that's been that odd is these kind of one-year visiting assistant professor positions that do offer healthcare and a somewhat livable wage and it seems that to lump those together with adjuncts that are getting actually a demotion after they finish their Ph.D. in terms of when you count in benefit and how much they're getting paid for courses seems to bring together two issues one has to do with the stability and the problems that come with that with an actual very urgent problem of people being able to survive and pay their bills under the label of contingent faculty so I was just wondering about strategies of how we can approach that distinction there. Let me also add and Jonathan should jump in we allowed the people who were defining themselves as contingent to define themselves as contingent so they might say I'm contingent because I'm working at six different schools teaching one class at each or I'm contingent because yes I have a full-time job for this year but I know that next year I'm going to be unemployed and on the move again so as you say it was a lot about stability that was a critical concern that came up over and over again I don't know if you want to add to that I'm probably not saying anything that isn't already known but within larger studies of contingent faculty and in the United States there's that term is also slippery right that depending on the study that you look at it can vary between 60 and 70 percent and sometimes the studies include graduate students sometimes the studies don't include graduate students sometimes the studies are focused solely on full-time faculty sometimes that are non-tenure tracts sometimes they include adjuncts so your point is a very valuable one for us to keep in mind I don't have an answer for you other than yes we have to I think be more careful in parsing those differences I was just going to say this is Beth Osnes with the University of Colorado and I think what your talk and just this whole weekend has done for me has really helped me with unbiasing my mind destigmatizing my brain about these employment opportunities beyond the academy and also the ones that don't result in tenure-track jobs and it brings into focus my attitudes that have resulted in real behaviors that have I was brought up Catholic so it's like we talked about acts of omission is a sin so where are my acts of omission that have been a result of these attitudes that I didn't even know I was carrying around and this awareness I'm really grateful for just to add a question to yours about how contingent faculty are defined or how they're defining themselves I remember clearly when I was on the job market being told that if I was in a full-time visiting gig then I was still viable for the tenure-track market but if I was in a part-time adjunct gig then that was sort of the kiss of death and so I'd be curious to know in future data collection if you decide to go this direction what the time to tenure-track is for part-time versus full-time contingent or so can I ask just to clarify people that held part-time jobs and then got tenure-stream jobs if you were if you were part-time adjunct then the word on the street was that it was difficult if not impossible to eventually land a tenure-track job but if you were in a full-time visiting position then that was considered sort of a step into the tenure-track position thank you University of Alberta I have sort of two or three observations and a question also one observation is I think the availability of contingent faculty probably also has a big impact on how it is used what I'm thinking of is in my own situation whenever a colleague of mine, a Ph.D. colleague goes on sabbatical it's very difficult to replace that colleague because the Ph.D.s are simply not available in Edmonton which is a big difference from say the University of Toronto where there are many, many Ph.D. people that hang around on the contrary an MFA colleague that goes on sabbatical is immediately replaced by another MFA colleague at contingent faculty because there are so many around the environment I think plays a huge role into these statistics and perhaps a question I have and it came up in my head when the the statistic a number of years after degree where does the postdoc sit in all of this and it's sort of a bit of the elephant in the room particularly in Canada it's almost now the norm that somebody finishing a Ph.D. gets a postdoc in many, many disciplines also in our discipline so it almost is yet another couple of years typically two years of specialization and if you want professionalization perhaps we can use the term there although I actually have some qualms about that but I don't hear it here at all and I wonder in your survey whether that came up or not and how that is in the States I have no idea I don't feel like it came up in any sufficiently significant number that the experience that we're reporting is the more common experience of course the advantage of a postdoc is that the focus is on to a large extent mentorship and getting that book out and that's the gap that so many people are falling into once they hit that contingent track so Noemantez Tufts University I'll just say that in my own study of the 632 Ph.D. that the field is produced from 11 to 17 that there are very few U.S. Ph.D. students who are getting postdocs inside of 5% comfortably I can look at the numbers and say inside of 2% to 3% the postdoc just doesn't have the same cultural resonance in the States at least that you're describing in Canada Sean Metzger, UCLA I'm wondering if you know a little bit more about how your interviewees are thinking about book production and the reason I'm asking what's behind the question is I don't want to, I'm trying for us as a profession to resist the idea that people need to come into their first job with a book already or a book contract I mean that seems to be an increasing trend and it makes me a bit nervous So I don't think we were trying to get to the idea of are you going to come into your job with your book, I think what we were trying to look at is where does your research go right, when you're spending four and a half years on the contingent labor market teaching maybe six or seven or eight classes a year to doing a part-time job what happens to that research does it go cold on you, are you getting to pursue it so if you don't have the capacity to transform it into anything, so that was one of the reasons Arrow was yeah Josh Abrams Central School of Speech and Drama University of London I just wanted to add to the postdoc question that actually one of the funding issues in the UK that's changed is it's now much more difficult in grants through many of the research councils to add in PhD students but it's become easier to add in postdocs and so there's a shift there that's been very interesting and add on to that in a project that a colleague Kate Ellswit is doing that just got funded on Catherine Dunham and a heavy digital humanities project there are two postdocs in it and because of a number of things the advertisement period was very tight on those and we got a remarkable number of applications from the US so it's certainly something that recent graduate students and contingent faculty are aware of and are looking at but it's that the opportunities don't exist as much I think Charlotte Canning the University of Texas at Austin nationally the numbers are about 70% of faculty jobs are non-tenure track 30% tenure track and I think my own university is somewhat typical of public universities that have started to create a whole new series of titles professor of instruction or professor of practice with all the ranks assistant associate and so on that often have rolling contracts so for example you might be on a rolling three-year contract which means you're always in a way guaranteed three years more employment you're re-upped every year you know you're the you have full benefits and something approaching a reasonable salary although the salaries are much lower than tenure and tenure track faculty salaries and I'm wondering what this means for us in terms of our PhD students because the explosive growth and jobs in academia is not in the professoriate it's in those supporting professions advising career services development etc etc etc offices in diversity and inclusion offices and those kinds of things and I'm wondering how we start thinking about faculty because one thing we all share despite the differences among us in terms of institution of how impossible we feel it is to do our jobs and how little time we have to do all the great ideas that get outlined here well at the undergraduate level most of that is now being done by professional staff and not by faculty so I'm wondering is what does that mean in terms of of where our students might be and what their jobs might be like I mean maybe in 10 to 15 to 20 years that number will be 30% will be even smaller and almost none of our students will be be being put into tenure track jobs so I'm just wondering how we might continue to benchmark these studies and ideas against what's happening in the larger academy and thinking about those kinds of destinations within the academy and how those are changing other questions comments we have time for we've got about five minutes left if we want to take advantage of that Johnson chambers Bowling Green responding just to one thing that Charlotte said I know at my institution that the non tenure track positions that are available in the humanities are almost exclusively teaching and with also service obligations that is that research is not built into the job descriptions at all another reason that we tried to collect that information about so where's your research going what's happening to your research any final questions or comments before we wrap up this session alright then thank you Heather for presenting all of this data thank you all