 As my PowerPoint uploads, I will note that we have some snacks in the corner there. Please feel free to help yourself through the course of the afternoon. If you are looking for restrooms, you can find a women's room just to the right of this door, a gender inclusive restroom on the third floor, and a men's room in the basement of the building. There is an elevator that you can access as well as the stairs. So this is my talk that's opening, Strengthening Job Prospects Within and Beyond the Academy, a state-of-the-field address for the fourth symposium of doctoral programs in theater and performance studies. Thank you for coming together on this day. I'd like to thank again my graduate assistants, Emma Feuthi and Reza Mirsajati for their tireless work, as well as my data visualization consultant, Danielle Rosvalli at the University of Buffalo. Thanks to financial support from Tufts Graduate School of the Arts and Sciences, as well as the Department of Theater Dance and Performance Studies. Thanks also to those of you who are following along with the convening via HowlRound and on Twitter using the hashtag TAPSPHD. My hope is that today marks the beginning of a collaborative field-wide effort to answer the following questions. One, what does the state-of-the-academic job market look like? Two, what are the skills that graduates who come out of our programs developing and how are we shaping that process? And three, how are we utilizing our graduate students' time and energy in our doctoral programs in order to help prepare them for careers within and beyond the academy? Later this weekend we'll also have space in this convening to talk about the ways that we can better advocate for the value of our PhD programs to university administrators, fundraisers, and prospective applicants. My knowledge of the academic job market is shaped by two experiences. The first is as a graduate student matriculating from Indiana University in 2009. As a first-generation college student, I came to grad school with the expectation that a PhD would lead directly to a tenure-track job. During my time at Indiana, I regularly directed productions, wrote a dissertation on a topic of growing interest to the field, presented research at major conferences, published reviews and essays in academic journals. Nevertheless, I spent three years looking for a tenure-track position, finally buoyed by professional directing and dramaturgy work accumulated through my time at Cleveland Playhouse and Cleveland Public Theater, as well as an expansive portfolio of adjuncting in schools across northeastern Ohio. Although I'm glad to be one of the fortunate individuals hired into a tenure-track job, I spent most of those three years in the market wondering if I was personally doing something wrong. I never stopped to consider that academia and theater and performance studies didn't have enough room to accommodate all of its graduates. The next time I felt compelled to seriously think about the academic job market occurred a little over two years ago when I became director of graduate studies for the PhD program in theater and performance studies at Tufts. In order to take on the labor of preparing graduate students for careers within and beyond the academy, I wanted to learn what trends were emerging from academic job postings, what institutions were doing the best job at getting their students hired and whether there were any commonalities among the programs that demonstrated repeated success. But this data, which is so essential to understanding how academic labor markets operate, didn't exist. And because as the members of my fantasy sports leagues will attest, I'm a stats nerd with a love of accumulating unusual data. I developed a couple of longitudinal studies to help me discover how many graduates of our PhD programs are getting placed, how long it's taking those folks to find academic positions or ultimately decide to leave the academy, what programs can do to better position their doctoral candidates for the market and what search committees are looking for. But as a scholar and theater artist who has not applied for a non-academic position since I was an undergraduate, I also know that I need to learn how to help students find opportunities beyond the academy and that I didn't know where to begin two years ago. In traditional academic form, I turned to books. I started reading everything that I could get my hands on, including pieces by Susan Basala and Maggie Dabilius and Karen Kelski. In addition to blogs, web essays, and workshops that I found through social media. The totality of this work has helped me to develop a pedagogy and professional development course for first-year doctoral students at Tufts, where we discuss academic and alt-academic job markets and how to prepare for career success in multiple sectors. Although I don't claim to know everything about helping doctoral students market their skills, I feel more comfortable giving students the resources that they need to think about career trajectories from their first year in the program than I did two years ago. And I know that many of you are engaged in this work too, so I'm pleased that we're joined by leading experts in training graduate students to understand how to market and develop their skills. I'd like to welcome Maren Wood of Beyond the Professoriate. We'll later be joined by Paula Chambers of the Versatile PhD and Sarah Peterson of Imagine PhD. They'll speak with us about how we can better shape our graduate programs from coursework to the dissertation in order to better serve our students. I look forward to hearing from our speakers over the course of this convening, but before we do, I wanted to take the time to share some broad data about how we are admitting, moving through and training graduate students in the field, before looking to explore theater and performance studies job ads over the past two years, and finally to look at the current careers and trajectories held by over 98% of the 633 PhDs who have earned degrees in our programs from 2011 to 2017. I'd like to begin by presenting information about the 465 graduate students who were discussed in our self-reported surveys and how they're utilizing time spent in their programs as revealed through the survey that many of us filled out. I'll compare the results of this year's survey with results from the 2015 survey taken by program directors who attended the third symposium at Colorado Boulder. From there, I'd like to talk about the academic job market for theater history and performance studies from 2012 to 2017-18, drawing from data that my graduate assistants and I have accumulated. Finally, I'd like to conclude with a snapshot of career paths for the over 600 individuals who have accumulated PhDs in theater and performance studies in the United States from 2011 to 2017. Using ProQuest's dissertation database and other digitized searches, I've learned about the career trajectories of over 98% of these graduates. I hope that all of this data provides a starting point for thinking about our field, our programs, students who emerge from our institutions, and the way that we can support their work. So part one, who are our current doctoral students in theater and performance studies programs and how are they navigating? Much of the data for this section is drawn from the self-reporting survey that I sent out to every director of a theater and performance studies program in the United States and Canada. 25 institutions responded to this year's program. In comparison, the 2015 survey had 30 respondents. Although both surveys had over 40 questions that were being addressed, and I've posted the full surveys for both 2015 and 2018 on a Google Drives link that you'll have access to later in this convening, I'm only going to pay attention to some specific data that's germane to this year's convening. I'd like to begin by looking at some statistics on how many students are currently pursuing doctoral degrees in our programs. In 2015, the mean answer to this question was 17.76 students per PhD program, with variations in enrolled students ranging from a one-person PhD cohort to an institution that enrolled 67 doctoral students. This year, the mean number of PhD students per program is 18.6, with the smallest sized university enrolling seven students and another enrolling a high of 62. This slight increase in program size also corresponds with annual admissions patterns. In 2015, graduate programs that completed the survey admitted a range of one to eight students per year, with a mean enrollment of 3.0. In 2018, responding programs revealed the same minimum and maximum admissions numbers from one to eight, but the mean number of graduate students enrolled on an annual basis has risen to 3.45 doctoral students per program. As the job market has some sense of recovery post-2012, the number of students who were admitting into our program is slightly growing. Moreover, as our enrollments increase, the average theater and performance studies PhD students' time to degree also seems to be seeing an uptick in several markers. The survey reveals that graduate students in our programs are taking an average of 2.87 years to finish coursework and other requirements before beginning their dissertations, and that the average time to degree is 5.735 years. Both of these data sets mark escalations from 2015 when PhD program directors noted that it took their students 2.72 years to reach ABD status and 5.07 years to attain their PhDs. This also bears out in the growing number of students who we have at the ABD stage of our programs. At present, there are 10.45 doctoral students on average who are ABD as opposed to 9.24 in 2015. While our admissions numbers and students' times to degree are slightly increasing, however, there is some stability in the number of PhDs that we're producing in any given year. According to information accumulated from ProQuest dissertation database and several university libraries, the US-based PhD programs and theater and performance studies have produced approximately 90 graduates per year between 2011 and 2017. You can see two outliers, that's a high of 124 PhDs produced in 2013 and a low of 72 PhDs produced in 2017, but aside from these two, there's minimal variance in numbers. The number of PhDs produced by US theater and performance studies programs also varies widely from university to university. Between 2011 and 2018, NYU has conferred 49 PhDs, while the University of Buffalo, for instance, is a newly formed doctoral program that is yet to confer, but will this summer, I believe, its first PhD. Congratulations. The average number of PhDs produced per institution, if you want to get a sense of mean average between 2011 and 2017, is 16.62. And all of this data will be made accessible to you as well, because I know that this chart, particularly, can be a little bit difficult to read. The racial and ethnic diversity of our programs also seems to be holding steady from 2015. Of the 465 students accounted for in our self-reported survey of doctoral programs, we note that approximately 5.65% of our students in our programs identify as African American, 7.1% of our students identify as Latinx, 6.24% identify as Asian American, and 1.29% as Native American or Indigenous. Just under 20% of our enrolled graduate students come from countries outside of the United States, and these numbers do closely correspond to statistics presented in the 2015 symposium survey. As a field, we're still supported by a university infrastructure that trains students predominantly as teachers. All of our institutions who reported on the survey noted that we offer teaching assistantships to students during their PhD programs, and that the vast majority, 80% of programs, are able to offer teaching assistantships to all of their enrolled students for at least some part of their time on campus. Fewer of our programs, 60% or so, offer research assistant positions, and the vast majority of us who do so are only able to do so on an extremely limited basis for fewer than half of our graduate students. There's also an extraordinarily small number of programs, roughly 32%, that offer administrative assistantships that train students to work in arts administration and other organizational capacities. In sum, we're a field that has had a slight increase in the number of enrolled doctoral students we've taken into our programs over the past three years, but while our enrollments remain robust, we're not necessarily creating more space for students of color, and we're currently offering the same types of assistantship packages that have existed since many of us were in graduate school. As my first call to action in this address, I wish to invite the members of this convening to imagine how we might reconceptualize the assistantship in order to train students for a variety of potential career sectors. Part two, what's the state of the academic job market? The research for this portion of the talk was collected from a project undertaken with my two assistants in the summer of 2016. I began to explore academic job ads in order to see what courses applicants were being asked to teach within academic postings, what types of production experiences universities wanted from their prospective hires, and who was being appointed into these positions. I wanted to look at historical data that existed prior to 2016, in addition, as a way of getting a sense of the current landscape of the academic job market. So in order to accumulate this information, I used the following methods. From 2012 to 2015, I drew from the academic jobs wiki, which has long been a repository for academic job listings and conversations about trends in higher education employment. For job advertisements written during the 2016 and 2017 academic years, I looked at academic positions listed on Art Search, the Atha Job Bank, the Chronicle of Higher Education Performing Arts section, and Higher Ed Jobs Theater and Performance section. I specifically limited myself to posts that advertised in these sections, noting that a position truly wanted to capture the attention of a theater and performance studies Ph.D., that those are the places that would be most visibly marked for graduate students understand to look for postings. Additionally, I restricted my search to positions where the Ph.D. was either a requirement or a preference for the open position. For instance, an announcement advertising for an assistant professor to teach introduction to theater, theater history, and acting that listed an MFA as the sole requirement for employment, educational requirement for employment, was omitted from my list. From 2011 to 2016, I focused solely on tenure track positions, but last academic year in 2017-18, I opened the search of the parameters of my search to include all full-time positions, including visiting assistant professors, professors of practice, lecturers, clinical assistant professors, and other language that's used to determine a full-time position. Although the academic job wiki from 2012 to 2015 has many gaps in efforts to document open academic positions, particularly in its tendency to privilege, research one universities and small liberal arts colleges over, let's say, regional universities or other types of academic appointments, from 2012 to 2015 I collected a sample of 96 tenure stream assistant professor positions and learned some important baseline data. Among the 96 positions listed on the wikis in those years, 33 job postings required that the hired candidate direct as part of the production season, seven required engagement in production dramaturgy, and another two required expertise in at least one element of design. In addition, there was a wide array of courses that job ads specifically called for new hires to teach. The most frequently cited position was theater history, which was listed in 67 of 96 job ads. This was followed by non-western theater and performance, 31, dramaturgy, 21, directing and or devised performance, 19, racial or ethnically specific theater and performance, e.g., African-American theater, Latinx theater, Asian-American theater, etc., 18, acting, 14, script analysis, 14, intro to theater, 13, performance studies, 6, and play writing, 4. Finally, my assistants and I were able to navigate university websites in order to determine who got hired into the academic positions listed on the wikis. The field of theater and performance studies reveals itself to be grounded in the modern and contemporary as 86 out of the 96 hires specialized in theater and performance studies grounded in the 19th, 20th, and 21st centuries. 57 of the 96 candidates hired grounded their research in theatrical practices and performance studies methodologies that emphasize non-western and minoritarian subjectivities. Moreover, 19 of the 96 positions were accepted by professors who moved laterally from one tenure stream position to another. In the 2016-2017 academic year, which was the first year that I was able to draw fully from job ads, my assistants and I were able to conduct a more robust search of academic job advertisements drawing from trade papers. In 2016-2017, we found 59 job advertisements written as tenure-track positions ideally suited for PhDs in theater and performance studies in the United States. Of those postings, 32 required directing in the department season, two required dramaturgy, one required contributions to costuming the department season, and another required that the hired applicant participate in marketing the department's productions. The courses frequently desired from prospective hires in the 2016-2017 job listings included theater history, directing and devised performance, acting, performance studies, script analysis, introduction to theater, racial or ethnically specific performance, non-western theater and performance, and playwriting. As Reza and Emma and I began to unearth the results of the 2015-2016 academic job searches for PhDs in theater history and performance studies, we found that nine of the 59 positions, so about 15% of academic job searches in theater and performance studies that year, ended in failed searches. Additionally, 13 jobs went to candidates who moved laterally, and in spite of the PhD being called for as a requirement or strong preference for the job ads, eight positions still went to people who hold the MFA without a PhD. That meant that only 29 of 59 positions were taken by PhDs accepting their first tenure-track position. If we can hold questions until the end, please. Moreover, ongoing trends to hire scholars grounded in modern and contemporary performance, as well as those researching non-western and minoritarian subjectivities continued. 84.1% of hires specialized in 1920 and 21st century scholarship, and 54.2% of openings were taken by scholars working outside of the White Western Canon. In 2017-18, my research team expanded its capacity to not only consider tenure stream academic assistant professor positions, but also to consider full-time contingent postings, including those job ads for VAPs, lecturers, professors of the practice, etc. Last academic year, we found 56 tenure-track positions and 34 full-time contingent positions. Among the 34 contingent positions, 19 job advertisements required directing within the production season. Twenty ads listed theater history as a course that the institution would like the hired candidate to teach, followed closely by acting with 16, directing and devise theater, 13, script analysis, 8, introduction to theater, 7, racially or ethnically specific theater in performance 7, performance studies 7, non-western performance 5, stage management 3, playwriting 2, and one critical theory course. The 56 tenure stream academic positions required directing as part of the production season in 30 instances, while advertising for post-calling for candidates who could teach theater history in 34 instances, directing or devise performance 28, racially or ethnically specific theater in performance 22, script analysis 15, performance studies 15, acting 14, non-western performance 9, introduction to theater 9, dramaturgy 6, stage management 6, and playwriting 2. Now, because most of these postings, if they only got filled leading to people starting in August and September, my graduate assistants and I have yet to do the work of determining who precisely got hired into those positions, how many of them were lateral hires, and how many were failed searches. It's my hope that as soon as this convening ends, we'll be able to turn to that work, and once that works complete, I'll post it in the Google Drive that we'll all have access to as well as on Twitter at Noe Montez. So through this point in the presentation, we can comfortably discern that the field is producing approximately 90 PhDs per year and 55 or so tenure stream positions each year, many of which will lead to failed searches or to candidates making lateral moves. We can also determine that over half of the academic positions posted from 2012 to present require hired candidates to engage in their department's production seasons and that there's particular demand and consistent demand for courses that stretch students' understanding of theater history and performance beyond a Eurocentric point of view. Although the self-evaluation survey reveals that we're generally doing a pretty good job of incorporating non-western and minoritarian experiences into the coursework that we're offering our graduate students, I'd like to invite the members of this room to think about how we can use our program's resources to enhance our student skills as artistic theater and performance makers. Doing so will make our graduate students more competitive within the academic marketplace and also serve to empower those newly minted doctors who may not be able to find academic positions so that they can develop skills as theater artists that may serve them as they venture into careers beyond the academy. Part three, where are theater and performance studies PhDs finding jobs? The largest and final part of my research project on the state of our PhD programs in the academic and altacademic job markets has been an exploration of where each of our field's 632 conferred PhDs from 2011 to 2017 are currently employed. In order to conduct this research, my assistants and I have spent countless hours scouring through university databases in order to compile a full list of PhDs produced by each institution and from there we began to search for information about these folks using web searches, social media, and other publicly available information. We've compiled a spreadsheet documenting the current employment of 621 of these 632 graduates from theater and performance studies programs in the United States. From there we've categorized each individual into 6 different groupings depending on how they're employed. Tenure or tenure track, contingent, and this includes everything from multi-year VAPs to adjuncts, university administration, a self-identified independent scholar or artist, career trajectory outside of academia, or those 11 people who are simply unknown. In instances where an individual claimed multiple positions, such as an adjunct faculty member who also works as a freelance director or a real estate agent who also works as a freelance artist, we categorized the individual by their academic affiliation followed by their primary work affiliation so as not to artificially deflate the number of theater and performance studies PhDs working in academia and not to overinflate the number of individuals who work as freelance artists. We find that among graduates of theater and performance studies PhD programs from 2011 to 2017, 38% hold tenured or tenure track positions at colleges and universities across the United States. 25% hold contingent positions that range from these multi-year VAPs to adjunct positions. 16% of our graduates work outside of academia in a wide range of career sectors that I'll address shortly. 13% identify as independent artists and scholars. 6% work within university administration, and then there's that final one and a half percent or so who are unknown either to me, to my assistants, or to the directors of the PhD programs who I emailed in order to see if I could find further information about these individuals. Our placement rate for graduates varies widely from program to program with some but not statistically significant connection to the number of PhDs that each institution has produced over a seven-year window of the study. For example, of the top ten PhD producing institutions, three are among the top ten as I ranked them by placement rate, four are among the bottom ten. The tenure and tenure track placement rate reveals some slight improvement across time with graduates from 2011 to 2014 holding higher placement rates than those who finished their PhD programs from 2015 to 2017. Now what you're looking at in this study is just a snapshot of data as I conducted it from May 1st to July 1st of this summer. What my goal is to be able to track this data every single year so that I have specific information about how long it's taking folks to find jobs and where people are moving over the course of their careers. You can generally surmise some things from this data but again here it's not an exact science. For example, in exploring the year-to-year shifts among graduate students in a different way, we can estimate that it takes a significant number of PhDs three to four years to find their first tenure track position if they ever find one at all. Heather Nathans will present information from her conversations with contingent faculty members as part of a joint ASTR at the study later in this convening, but it does bear out with some of the preliminary findings that she shared at the 2017 at the conference. As an aside, I've learned that among the 632 PhDs produced by the field over the course of this decade, 48 are working in universities outside of the United States and 64 are working outside of theater and performance studies, departments and programs. The vast majority of these hires have found positions in English departments and women's gender and sexuality studies programs, but graduates of our degree programs have also found work in film, business, communication, ethnomusicology, ethnic studies, languages, art history, classics, general humanities, arts administration and policy, journalism and philosophy departments. The PhD students who work outside of academia have found employment in a wide variety of positions. Although the vast majority of those out of academia have worked as university administrators, there are several who have taken positions as elementary and secondary school teachers. We're also finding that graduates of our program who leave academia are finding jobs in arts administration, museum and archive curation, developmental editing, grant writing, nonprofits, office management, publishing, real estate, theater administration and theatrical production, and tutoring. There's also a small but statistically noteworthy number of graduates who have decided to stay at home as full-time parents. But in totality, after reviewing the data from folks who are working outside of the academic marketplace, I'm impressed by how widespread their labor is. Nevertheless, I wonder how many of these individuals feel as though their graduate programs could have better prepared them for careers outside of the academy, and how many might feel some stigma and disconnection from their programs because they've chosen to work outside of the academic world. So as a group, as we move forward over the course of this weekend, I pose the following questions to us. One, how can we work in unison to decrease the stigma that PhD students feel when they start to look for work outside of the academy? Two, how can we as directors of PhD programs incorporate professional development training and professionalization practices that encourage our students to consider positions within and beyond the academy? And three, what are action steps that we can take today, tomorrow, and after the conference in order to share resources and pedagogical practices so that we can reduce each other's labor? I think we've got a great convening ahead of us, and I look forward to what comes next. Thank you. We do have about 20 to 25 minutes or so for questions, so if there are any, I'm happy to take them. Yeah, go ahead, Nadine, and we have the questions. Okay, do I have to look in the camera too? I think you're probably okay. So I have a comment and a question. My comment is that it seems as though there's something to be looked at in terms of MFA's and PhD's and as terminal degrees and how there's sort of crossover in the labor. So it looked like you were saying sometimes the job went to an MFA and sometimes PhD's are being asked to do the work of MFA's, so that seems interesting. And then my question is, did you, in your research, are you able to determine how many people are doing something other than what they want to do? Right, so how many people are settling for something else? Because some of these positions might be what they want to do, or some of those other sort of ancillary positions might be right up their alley and some people might be settling. So those seem like different outcomes. Sure. One, this project is not interview-based. I'm not generally speaking to candidates who are on the market. The study that Heather is conducting with Help of Vero and a few other people through Atha Aster is conducting interviews and has conducted several dozen at least. And I think Heather will be able to speak to some of that more tomorrow in her session. I would love to be able to chart the number of MFA's produced by the field and their job placement rates also, but it's a long haul of just doing that data for PhD students. There are several hundred more MFA students produced by our programs in any given year, I'd suspect. I can also just say I want to just shout out to the like geeking out data collection that went on here, so thank you. Thanks. I can speak for my people. Pass it on to Oda. Thanks, Oda Johnson. Yes, again, this data is marvelous. This will be so useful, so I'm so thankful that somebody has the aptitude to make pie graphs legible. So here's where my confusion in that same conversation around MFA's come from. A very frequent profile of the MFA of the PhD is they come in with an MFA and then they transition back to this. And, lamentably, of all too frequent profile is that they remain ABD. So when these MFA's are going out, and when these jobs are going to the MFA, are they really just MFA's? Are they MFA's ABD's who have not wholly finished? Where is the ABD in all of this? That's a good question and one that I don't have an answer to, where ABD's fit into all of this. In instances where an ABD has been hired, I have listed them as PhD's with a presumption that they are going to do the work to finish their PhD program. It seems as though you may have some skepticism about that. It's just the experience that once they land that job, they sort of remain as a perpetual MFA ABD. And they are so skilled at what they do, the final requirement is a promissory note that is never delivered. And I'm just curious where that fits in all of this because that seems like a larger population than we may want to admit to. Sure, I think that's worth looking into, but it's easy for me to go on ProQuest and see completed dissertations. It's much harder for me to go and look at the dissertations that were started and never finished. I'm not sure how I would go about doing that. At one point I thought about TJ's dissertations in progress, but there seems to be wide variation from among the programs with regards to, A, whether we submit our students' names and B, at what stage our students are in their dissertation projects when we submit those names to TJ. This is Beth Osnes with the University of Colorado. I'm just interested to know if you, even if you don't have it as a point of data, if you have been noticing how many calls there were for explicitly applied theater or even publicly engaged theater, so many of our PhDs are doing work of this nature and I'm just interested to know if you saw that emerging in your data. I haven't listed specific applied theater positions, so I don't have an answer to that. I can say that in many of the positions that list devised theater as something that they're looking for, and I've lumped those together with directing and the job ads for the sake of my own expediency, many of those devised positions are looking for someone who can do devised work in an applied theater setting, but I don't have the hard statistical numbers on that for you right now. I think Andrea had her hand up a while back too. Thanks, Josh Abrams. One with regard to the TJ thing, there have been conversations within ATHA about moving that outside of TJ because it doesn't make sense and I think one of the things that would be really useful to think about is how if that moved to an online site it could be more used by all of us and more productive in producing the kind of data you're looking for. But then the second question I had was a methodological question about some of the pie charts. So the pie charts assume that everything adds to one, and when you're doing that with... With the course listings. Yeah, that's what I was wondering, it implies that you're only choosing one? No, those are just... So if you counted up the numbers, for instance, that I listed in the first pie chart, you know, they add up to more than like the 92 jobs. I'm just noting the frequency with which they're listed. Yeah, thanks. Thank you, Pete Defray University of Alberta. At some point in a way you refer to the fact that a number of pages, and I forget the number, got a job outside of the states. Do you have further data on that? That's kind of interesting. There were 48, I believe, I forget, let me... Yes, 48 working in universities outside of the United States. I'd say approximately half, maybe a little more than half, were international students, particularly international students from Asia who then returned to their home countries and teach at universities at those institutions. But there is not inconsiderable percentage of students who proceed to find academic positions in Canada or in the United Kingdom or other parts of the European Union as well. And the other part of the question is, of course, then what about foreign hires in the states? Do you have any data on that? Like, for instance, Canadian PhDs, for instance. That is harder for me to discern because, again, it's difficult to look at university websites and know from that data what nation a person comes from. I would love to get a sense of that. I just don't know how to do it in a reasonable way yet. So if there are any suggestions from the room, I'd be glad to hear them. Maren, we can pass that back. And then we've got to get on to you. But just to sort of answer part of your question. So I did a big study for the Chronicle of Higher Education. I looked at 2,500 jobs across humanities, social sciences, and STEM from 2013-2014. Very similar methodology. And I found that Canadian schools, about 50% of the hires in Canada, went to Canadian-trained PhDs that year. And that the other jobs that were listed in Canada went to international hires. As far as Canadian-trained PhDs going to the United States, across the 2,500, it was about 3%. So there was not a big draw for Canadian PhDs into the United States. I have looked at every four-year institution in Canada who was hired in English and History. I did a piece in the University Affairs about that. And I know that in that it's about 56% of history faculty earned their PhDs outside of Canada. And it's a little bit closer in English. And I know there's been similar studies done in sociology, where again it's about half of PhDs that are on faculty in Canada, are trained in Canada, and the rest are the United States. And then a small number are coming from the Francophone schools. The Francophone schools, of course, they are some that are being hired from France. But in terms of who's going into the Canadian schools, it's largely American-trained, and then Oxford and Cambridge were the two biggest ones from the UK. Thank you, Noe. And thank you so much for this presentation. It's really absolutely fascinating. Shocking also a little bit. So my name is Anciputi University of Toronto. I wonder if we as a group over these two days might identify professional skills that we could call transferable skill sets. Because it seems to me that given the diversity of jobs outside academia, requires something that is somehow inherent in our fields and our methodologies of organization production and research, but at the same time applicable and desirable in other industries. So I wonder what that might be. The other question or idea we could discuss is if I listen to my colleagues from the sciences, what I find is that there is a number of, they have a number of industry partners who do actually fund future generations of their leadership by funding PhD students. So I never heard that any department has such collaborations going on in the drama, theater and performance studies field. Is there maybe, are there opportunities that could be built for PhD students who come into programs, who come already as people with the future job working through programs that are funded by industry partners, for example. I think this would also make it much easier to limit or decrease stigma for applicants who want to go into PhD programs and don't want to pursue an academic career. So just to share these thoughts. So to address your first question, it's my hope that Marin, Paula and Sarah will be able to help us identify those transferable skills that through the work that they've done across multiple career sectors and in thinking about how humanities PhD students might be able to make those transitions. So that's very much a part of the conversation that I hope that we'll have over the next three days, two days. With regards to forming partnerships with other industries, I'm certainly not familiar with any practice like that, not only within drama, theater, performance studies programs, but across the humanities largely. So it's worth thinking about and brainstorming, but I don't know what sort of models are actually in place for us in the humanities that we could actually replicate. And again, maybe some of the folks in this room do know of some things. Shannon Steen, UC Berkeley. I wanted to come back to the theory practice question that I think is really at the heart of this MFA versus PhD question. I in the middle of this. And that's to raise what I think is probably a pretty profound existential question for us as a field around this on a curricular level. I know that a lot of us were around in the 90s when there were the threatened closure or the actual closure of several theater departments across the country. And that one of the reasons that that happened was because theater departments became unable to articulate to the rest of their university colleagues how what we did fit into the missions of the institutions. And that the shift in training in the 90s that really de-emphasized practice was partly an attempt to train people who did the research wing of theater studies to really be able to have conversations with our colleagues in other fields and to talk about the intellectual importance and weight of what it was that we did. And so one of the questions that I have coming out of this really important data is that if we train our graduate students back into something that looks more akin to the artist scholar models that did operate inside of our field prior to the mid 90s. How do we do that without disabling ourselves from being able to have cross disciplinary conversations that people in other fields take seriously? There's a real curricular problem and a real time issue about how we manage to ensure that our students are conversant with people in other fields if we also make them conversant with practicing artists in our own departments. And I would really love to hear a conversation about how we deal with that conundrum because I think it's really serious and particularly at a moment where we're looking at funding crises across universities in the U.S. and especially around humanities and arts departments. Sure and that's something I think a lot of us can feel invited to weigh in on as we consider Shannon's question. Can I just add one quick thing to that? I think also it works in the other direction. So if MFA's are getting jobs teaching theater history and theory, what does that mean for the field and the conversation and how are we training them to be conversant in these other fields? Hi, Heather Nathan's Tufts. I know that Henry Bile gathered a lot of data about the MFA slash PhD placement two, three years ago. So a lot of that information was gathered through ATHA and was made available on ATHA sites. I don't know if anyone has continued to keep that information current, but at least it exists up through 2015. If people want to look back and say, what are the actual percentages of jobs that were available that called for one or the other or both? And where did those jobs fall out in terms of placement? Thank you. Sean Metzger, UCLA. I just have a question again about methodology. I wonder if the contingent labor pool is disaggregated at all because I know it like it do. Professor, the practice is a 10 year renewable contract, but people make into the six figures. And the same thing is true of UCLA adjuncts can go quite high. So you may not want to get a tenure track job if you're in that kind of a position. Sure. I can divide that contingent labor pool into, you know, the various titles, you know, visiting professor, the practice, etc. For the purpose of providing this overview, I've listed everything together, but I'll go back and take a look at those numbers and create another chart that divides things up a little bit more specifically and post that to the Google Drive. And I think Heather has some thoughts about that, maybe. Yeah, please. So what I was going to say is in the interviews and the surveys that we were conducting for the study that Jonathan Aaron, some other folks and I were doing, we didn't have any people that were reporting that it was more profitable for them to be on the contingent labor track. So I know that Noe has the data about professors of the practice and things like that, but no one that we were speaking to was seeing it. I think I'm right, as preferable or more secure than a tenure stream position. Is that no one in a full-time? Because I'm thinking about people who are combining artistic professional and academic practices in ways that are potentially desired. Yes, so no one who was reporting that they were making their living as a contingent faculty member was suggesting that it was more profitable and more secure. Daphne, did you have a question or comment? Well, the question between the MFA and PhD students or faculty. And then, well, I mean, the department that I think Sean was just talking about that too, like the MFA program spends so much more money than the PhD program. So I feel there's a constant threat that for the faculty and students have to prove that what we do is valuable. So I feel like part of the training for graduate students is also how they converse with MFA faculty or the artistic side of the people that what scholarship means and things like that. We have about five minutes. If there are any, if there are one or two more questions, go ahead Nadine, and then we can take a brief break before we turn things over to Marin. I just hate pauses and so I could always find something to say. I was wondering, you know, I know we're going to get to advocacy, but do you have data in terms of sort of what upper administration thinks about what we do, getting to, you know, how do we articulate what we do and the importance of what we do in general and sort of how that plays out in terms of the jobs that are advertised? I don't have any data about administration values or beliefs. I think that there's probably such wide variance from institution to institution that it would be difficult to come up with any sort of concrete or definitive answers. I mean, just like as a field, are we growing? Are we shrinking? As Shana was saying that there was a fear that departments were shutting down and under threat. So, you know, we have lost a program recently, the Indiana PhD program is technically under, is technically a suspended program, but that's only because the state legislature has to vote on the closure of that program for it to become official and they haven't done so yet. But beyond Indiana and looking at the data from the self-reported survey, it seems as though our numbers across the institutions who reported are remaining stable or even growing a little bit in terms of the number of PhDs that we're taking every year and the number of students in our programs. I can say that just looking at our application pools at Tufts, there still seems to be a strong and robust interest in the PhD as something that students are applying towards and we can probably, as we have our advocacy conversation, start to discuss some of your other program application numbers to see what sort of trends might be emerging. Just a quick question as to whether you have any data about the university profiles of the tenure track posts. So, are most PhDs going into research or universities? It's widely variable. The posts consist of everything from Ivy League schools to small liberal arts colleges to regional universities and community colleges. I haven't done a specific breakdown of, because I find it hard to categorize institutions in that way about what types of institutions are doing the most hiring right now. But I think that is something that's worth looking into. If there are no other questions then I think we're at time. Thank you all for hearing this data and thank you all for your engaged conversation. Why don't we take about four to five minutes to get set up for Marin's talk. You can stand up, stretch, grab some candy and granola bars or use the facilities as you like. Thank you.