14, no. 3 (March 1983): 43-50 To the Editor Search

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THE question of the qualifications required to teach at the postsecondary level has long preoccupied the foreign language professoriat. In 1887, four years after being founded, the Modern Language Association published a survey of faculty holding doctorates. ¹ This report reflected the growing acceptance of the doctorate as the appropriate credential for those seeking faculty appointments. In 1878 Harvard College made the Ph.D. a requirement for university teaching; in 1904 the College of the City of New York required it for professorships, and the next year the University of Illinois followed suit. ² So essential did the doctorate become that, concomitant with the post-World War II expansion of higher education, the number of universities offering the Ph.D. mushroomed. While the growth of doctoral programs in languages was slower than that in several other fields, the number of doctorates awarded went from 242, in 1920–24, to 641 (1930–34), 693 (1940–44), 1,010 (1950–54), 1,349 (1960–64), and 4,614 (1970–74). ³ The continued increase of undergraduate enrollments throughout the 1960s stimulated efforts to ensure the availability of doctorate-holding faculty. As late as 1968, Don Cameron Allen, in The Ph.D. in English and American Literature , encouraged the streamlining of graduate programs to shorten the time necessary to produce faculty. Allen believed that the growth of two-year colleges would create additional demand for Ph.D.'s. But less than a decade later, the academic universe abruptly stopped expanding and began to shrink.

By 1976 the academic job market had deteriorated to the point that the Associations of Departments of English and of Foreign Languages (ADE and ADFL) saw fit to devote a joint issue of their Bulletins to a review of the alarming state of employment prospects for the profession. ⁴ The first of four surveys of placement patterns for new Ph.D.'s in language and literature was undertaken the following year. Readers of the ADFL Bulletin are all too familiar with the increasing difficulty faced by new Ph.D.'s in their search for full-time faculty positions. ⁵

Of particular concern to the MLA-ADFL staff, the ADFL executive committee, and the MLA advisory committee on the job market was a set of statistics that flew in the face of the best efforts of graduate departments to help their protégés find academic employment. Reporting for the Higher Education Panel of the American Council on Education, Frank Atelsek and Irene Gomberg found that of new, full-time faculty appointed in arts and humanities at four-year colleges only 49% had Ph.D.'s or claimed to be within two years of finishing the terminal degree. At community colleges the corresponding figure was a paltry 13.1%. ⁶ The figures immediately evoked the question: Why, in a buyer's market of surplus Ph.D.'s, would institutions hire faculty whom the profession would characterize as less qualified?

The facile answer—that these institutions are reducing salary costs by hiring at the M.A. level—is faulty for three reasons: (1) doctorate-holding job candidates can be—and are—hired at the lecturer level as well as for assistant professorships; the AAUP has no policy decrying this less-than-desirable practice, and candidates are today accepting such appointments; (2) the success of M.A.-holding faculty in converting their instructorships to assistant professorships on completion of the doctorate indicates that their positions are not limited to non-tenure track appointments; ⁷ and (3) there is some indication that the fields of history and philosophy hire proportionately more Ph.D.'s than do the language disciplines. ⁸ With these considerations in mind, we concluded that there might be a job market for M.A.'s worth investigating: Was the profession reverting to the pre-1970s career pattern of securing a faculty position at the M.A. stage, or slightly thereafter, and then taking time to complete the doctorate? Were other criteria, more important than possession of the terminal degree, influencing the selection of faculty? Perhaps the hiring institutions valued personal characteristics over graduate credentials; perhaps regional ties or sensitivity to the problems of a particular student body were relevant considerations.

The “worst-case scenario” that we anticipated would have involved a rejection of the research-oriented values cultivated in graduate education. While many of us dispute a conflict between the values of pedagogy and research, many have perceived these orientations to be at odds. In his study of the Ph.D. in English, Allen cites the existence of numerous debates on the topic, including presentations as long ago as 1884, at the MLA convention, and 1898, at the Federation of the Graduate Clubs (also called the Federation of Graduate Students). ⁹ All too often this debate has continued to be manifested in the organizations we choose, or decline, to join, as evidenced by references to it in the report of the MLA's Commission on the Future of the Profession. ¹⁰ Community colleges in particular accept this split in values. While one expects the percentage of doctorate-holding faculty to be lower there than in four-year institutions, one does not expect it to be substantially lower in the humanities, where there is an oversupply of Ph.D.'s. Atelsek and Gomberg emphasize the low level of Ph.D. appointments with the additional finding that 36.2% of their sample of 1,146 two-year colleges do not prefer doctorates for any new faculty. ¹¹ In their concluding remarks on hiring in two-year colleges, the authors cite Arthur Cohen, president of the Center for the Study of Community Colleges: “Community college administrators frequently complain that graduate education is inadequate to train teachers for their institutions.” ¹² In an essay in. the Chronicle of Higher Education , a chairman of a two-year-college English department recently underscored Cohen's 1976 remark. It isn't that the community colleges do not hire Ph.D.'s because they are overqualified, she wrote; the problem is that they are undertrained. ¹³

Thinking that such a perception might be widely held, we wanted to determine the relative importance assigned by hiring departments to scholarly and to pedagogical preparation. Such a finding would be of general importance for the teaching of the humanities and of specific importance to both the graduate departments and the students preparing for academic careers. A survey of hiring criteria in language departments would provide a demand-side rather than a supply-side perspective on the academic job market, which could help graduate departments improve students' preparation for employment.

We received funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities to conduct the survey during the academic year 1981–82. We began with lists of three types of institutions: those offering an associate's degree, those granting a bachelor's or master's degree (or both), and those granting the doctorate. The doctoral list was further subdivided to differentiate departments that have their own Ph.D. programs (which we shall call doctoral departments) from departments that do not grant the Ph.D. but belong to institutions that grant the doctorate in other fields (which we shall call university departments). From the four resulting lists, which were arranged in order of full-time-equivalent (FTE) student enrollment, we eliminated those institutions that do not teach foreign languages. We then selected a representative sample of institutions of various sizes, establishing four categories by total FTE enrollments: over 20,000, 10,000 to 20,000, 2,000 to 10,000 and under 2,000. Intending to survey about 20% of postsecondary language departments, we ended with a sample of 685 departments (19.8% of our estimate of all departments in which languages are taught). To these we sent a questionnaire asking for information on the number of faculty hired within the last three years, their academic credentials, the means used to advertise and interview for the positions, and most important, the considerations involved in deciding on the successful candidates. Coded questionnaires revealed the type of institution but did not further indentify it. We hoped that a guarantee of anonymity would encourage greater candor.

Of the 495 departments responding (72.3%), 45.5% had hired full-time language faculty within the last three years. By type of department, however, the picture is quite diverse: of the doctoral departments, 78.0% had hired faculty; of the university departments, 64.2% had hired; of departments in institutions that grant up to the master's (which we shall call B.A.-M.A. departments), 48.8% had hired; and in two-year colleges, only 17.4% had hired. These figures and our projection of the number of faculty hired nationally over three years are presented in Table 1. These statistics should enable colleagues in these four types of departments to compare their hiring statistics with the average for each type. These figures should also be useful to job candidates who wish to find academic employment in a particular type of department.

By comparing the number of faculty hired by each type of department to the total hired, we can assign a proportion of the academic job market to each type. These percentages, which are also presented in Table 1, reveal that the distribution of faculty appointments may cause problems for different types of departments seeking to fill specific needs for faculty.

The doctoral and university departments together account for over 60% of the faculty hired. Since candidates stand a better chance (statistically) of finding employment in such departments, they may endeavor to conform to the desiderata for faculty in these departments. Moreover, graduate departments would tend to instill values consistent with the emphasis and needs of their own programs; if these values coincide with the desiderata of most of the hiring departments, the values are perpetuated. The B.A.-M.A. departments, with 32.2% of the job market, constitute a significant portion of academic employers; but since they hire only half as many faculty as the doctoral institutions, they are likely to be shortchanged in trying to match their desiderata for faculty with the characteristics of graduates of the doctoral programs. Since two-year-college departments account for only 7.6% of recently hired faculty, Ph.D.-producing departments are likely to neglect these schools' specific faculty needs.

A consideration of the number of institutions of various sizes reveals an additional variable that may affect the particular qualities demanded by the job market. Of the institutions on our lists, less than 2% enrolled more than 20,000 students; about 5% enrolled between 10,000 and 20,000; not quite 32% enrolled between 2,000 and 10,000; and the remaining institutions—over 61%—enrolled fewer than 2,000 students. Yet institutions with enrollments of over 2,000 students, only 39% of our total, account for 78.5% of faculty hirings in the past three years, as shown in Table 2.

Responses to the question concerning the minimum credentials expected of applicants can be presented from several perspectives. Table 3 shows that 40% of the nation's departments expect to hire Ph.D.'s (19.4% expect candidates to have the doctorate in hand when they apply, and 20.6% expect them to have completed all degree requirements by the time they begin teaching). A similar percentage expressed willingness to hire M.A.'s. Most of the hiring, however, occurs in the doctoral and university departments. Of these 72.4% of the university departments and 80% of the doctoral departments expect candidates to have completed the Ph.D. by the time they begin their faculty duties. The figures in Table 3 represent responses from both the departments that had hired and those that had not.

We asked the departments that had hired to cite the highest credentials offered by successful applicants. Although we provided a means to distinguish credentials required for instructors from those for assistant professors, a number of responding departments neglected to differentiate between types of appointments. Consequently, our analysis, given in Table 4, includes both instructors and assistant professors. Even with this caveat, we find it important to note that some 60% of the community college departments hired Ph.D.'s and that significant numbers of other departments hired below the Ph.D. level.

To determine how essential the doctorate is for a faculty appointment and to understand the ACE finding that many departments prefer not to hire doctorates, we asked departments to whom the question applied to explain why they have such a hiring policy. Of 151 respondents to the question, most were from the smaller institutions: 58% from colleges with FTE enrollments under 2,000; 33.9% from institutions with FTE between 2,000 and 10,000. We listed seven possible reasons (designed by us or suggested by our test group of fifty departments) but encouraged respondents to give other reasons as well. Twenty-two respondents gave more than one reason for choosing a non-Ph.D. Table 5 presents the frequency of each response and includes a breakdown by hiring and nonhiring departments.

Of the 495 survey respondents, 345 (69.7%) responded to a question on interviews. Perhaps on account of the guarantee of anonymity 11.2% of the respondents admitted that they did not publish notices of faculty vacancies. Furthermore, over half the respondents conducted no competitive interviews at any professional conventions. Table 6 identifies the media used to advertise positions and lists the conventions at which interviews are conducted. Multiple responses were allowed: seventy-eight departments used two media to advertise, twenty-one used three, and three used four; thirteen departments conducted interviews at two conventions, none at more than two.

Perhaps the most important item of information that we sought was a ranking of desiderata. We asked departments to name and rank the top three criteria used to select the successful applicants. We listed twelve desiderata and allowed space for departments to supply others. Our analysis, given in Table 7, gives the top six characteristics chosen by our respondents. Responses came from both the departments that had hired and those that had not, and Table 7 provides a separate ranking for those departments that actually employed these criteria in hiring. For example, among all responding university departments, fluency in the language ranks first. But university departments that had actually hired rank fluency second; like doctoral departments, they give first position to publication record or potential for publication. The publication of research is not among the top six criteria for the other two types of department: it is seventh for the B.A.-M.A. departments that had hired (eleventh for those that had not), and no two-year-college department offers it as a relevant criterion. Fluency ranks high on everyone's list, except in the two-year colleges. Since the nonhiring departments rank fluency third and the hiring departments rank it fifth, it seems the two-year college departments have greater difficulty meeting criteria peculiar to their institutions than they do in finding candidates with adequate language skills.

In the interest of eliminating discrimination, much effort has been made in the last few years to promote objective evaluation of credentials. Exclusive consideration of job-relevant criteria would presumably discount such intangibles as the personal impression a candidate makes on the interviewer. Not so, the departments now tells us. In responding to an interim report of this survey, Dieter Lotze notes:

Very important for us was the rather vague area of “personal characteristics.” Our school does not have a language requirement, and we need enthusiastic and outgoing teachers to attract students to our program. We looked for some indication of those characteristics in the letters of application, in the references, and particularly in the interviews at the MLA. Obviously one cannot quantify in this area but perhaps graduate students should be made more aware of the difference attitude and temperament can make among otherwise similarly qualified applicants. ¹⁴

Personality can indeed be relevant, especially for a department that wants to attract and retain students.

Departments that are hiring and those that are not can have different perceptions of desirable characteristics. Table 7, for example, shows considerable divergence in the ranking of criteria by hiring departments versus all departments in the two-year and B.A.-M.A. colleges. To a lesser degree, responses from Ph.D.-granting institutions also reveal discrepancies between anticipated desiderata and those applied when hiring.

In commenting on the interim findings of this survey, Barbara E. Elling, chairman of the MLA's committee on careers, noted that departments—even the relatively independent doctoral departments—are often pressured by their administrations to apply hiring criteria that do not reflect the departments' preferences. For example, a departmental need for fluency may be overruled by an institutional mission of research. ¹⁵ These comments prompted us to review the responses to our query about departmental autonomy in setting qualifications for positions. While 87% of our sample responded to the question, the small number of departments in some of our targeted subgroups (e.g., university departments that had not hired compared with those that had) precludes a full tabulation of results. Nevertheless, we note that

• 22% of all departments set their own qualifications without outside influence,
• 4.7% set their own criteria but are influenced by the practices of other departments,
• 62.2% set criteria in consultation with the administration,
• 8% have criteria set by the administration, and
• 3.1% use other procedures.

(N.B.: The composition of our sample gives heavier weight to the responses of small, primarily undergraduate departments.) Of the doctoral departments, 62.5% of those that had hired set their own criteria without external influence; 32.5% establish qualifications in consultation with the administration. These proportions were almost the reverse for the university departments: 62% consulted; 26% were completely on their own. Among the Ph.D.-granting departments that had not hired, 45.5% replied they would set criteria solely on their own, 27.3% thought they would consider practices in other departments, and 27.3% would consult the administration. Interestingly, among two-year-college departments that had hired, the same proportion set their own criteria as have them established by the administration (12.5% each); two thirds consult their administrations to set criteria. The percentage that expect the administration to dictate criteria is twice as high among nonhiring departments as among those that had hired.

As our questionnaire emphasized the hiring of faculty more than their training, we wanted to give respondents an opportunity to list the skills in which candidates had been inadequately prepared by their graduate curricula. To avoid influencing respondents, we suggested no answers. Though we expected a smaller response to a question requiring greater effort and knew that answers would be difficult to tally, we wanted to know the deficiencies that most bother chairpersons. Taking some license to group responses in broad categories, we find that departments want:

Pedagogical training and experience:

• More teacher training in the Ph.D. curriculum (mentioned 66 times);
• More knowledge about methods of teaching remedial courses (cited 5 times, in addition to the above);
• More teaching experience (mentioned 15 times; some suggested an apprenticeship in high schools or community colleges, but none of these recommendations came from a two-year college);
• Greater commitment to teaching, less to purely scholarly pursuits; reduction of attitudinal problems among candidates (mentioned 15 times);

Flexibility of graduate curriculum:

• Greater flexibility in teaching, development of “breadth” (mentioned 34 times);
• Ability to teach two (or more) foreign languages (cited 31 times);
• Interdisciplinary skills (cited 30 times);
• More familiarity with language, culture, history of the target area (mentioned 16 times);
• Graduate training in linguistics (cited 14 times).

Comments appearing 6 times or fewer concern the ineffectiveness of Ph.D.'s because of their contempt for students, the need for more experience abroad, more grammatical expertise, geopolitical awareness, experience in translating, acquaintance with computers, willingness to promote foreign language study, experience with ethnic students, ESL training, better dissertation guidance, better curricula vitae, and the ability to teach English composition.

We may conclude from the survey that the needs of hiring institutions—indeed, of Ph.D.-granting departments themselves—are not entirely met by existing graduate curricula and that undergraduate faculty in language and literature need better preparation for their teaching duties. Our protégés, Elling maintains, need more exposure to techniques of teaching literature. This sentiment is supported by Robert Baker (Middlebury Coll.), who remarked at the Northeast Conference that an undergraduate department wants to know if a candidate can teach literature as a humanistic subject (not as a science) in a way that is accessible to the current generation of students (Müller and Elling). In addition, Lotze points out:

I find some fault with the phrasing in [the] questionnaire and report and with a certain emphasis in the preparation of young college teachers. I love literature. But I am no exception in our department in that I teach with equal enthusiasm language courses on the beginning, intermediate, and advanced level. [W]e are looking for teachers who are flexible in all areas of instruction, not only in the “types of literature courses” they could offer.

(p. 4)

Our survey results do not confirm the statistics compiled by the Higher Education Panel of the American Council on Education. They do, however, reveal concern for the ability of new faculty to transmit their love of language and literature to their students. ¹⁶ We have not laid to rest the question raised a century ago about the capacity of professors to teach undergraduates. But in uncovering the breadth of interest in the topic, we have shown that debate is not limited to emphasis on language in opposition to emphasis on literature. Rather, language departments nationwide are concerned primarily with the educational mission of transmitting appreciation for the humanities to successive generations of students.

The author is Assistant Director of Foreign Languages Programs for the MLA and Associate Director of ADFL (on leave of absence, 1982–83).

¹ “List of Colleges and of Their Modern Language Professors,” PMLA , 3 (1887), App. V, 1xxix–cxxiii.

² Don Cameron Allen, The Ph.D. in English and American Literature: A Report to the Profession and the Public (New York: Holt, 1968), pp. 8, 15.

³ National Research Council, A Century of Doctorates: Data Analyses of Growth and Change (Washington, D.C.: National Academy of Sciences, 1978), table 2B, p. 13.

⁴ Employment and the Profession: ADE Bulletin , No. 50; ADFL Bulletin , 8, No. 1 (1976).

⁵ For specific figures by year, see Richard I. Brod et al., “The MLA Doctoral Survey: Foreign Languages, Comparative Literature, and Linguistics,” ADFL Bulletin , 9, No. 3 (1978), 1–2; and my reports, under various titles, in the following issues of the ADFL Bulletin : 10, No. 4 (1979), 19–22; 11, No. 4 (1980), 4–11; and 12, No. 4 (1981), 5–8. The last report also summarizes trends over the four years of the survey.

⁶ Frank J. Atelsek and Irene L. Gomberg, New Full-Time Faculty 1976–77: Hiring Patterns by Field and Educational Attainment , Higher Education Panel Reports No. 38 (Washington, D.C.: American Council on Education, 1978), tables 1 and 2, pp. 10, 11.

⁷ For the anticipated duration of non-tenure-track appointments, see Atelsek and Gomberg, Tenure Practices at Four-Year Colleges and Universities , Higher Education Panel Report No. 48 (Washington, D.C.: ACE, 1980); for another humanistic discipline, Bruce Campbell, of the Council on Graduate Studies in Religion, reports that of new assistant professors of religion, 80% obtained their employment while at the M.A.-ABD level (personal correspondence).

⁸ See, e.g., Cathy Henderson and Cecilia A. Mitchell, Selected Characteristics of Full-Time Modern Language Faculty, Fall 1979 , A Special Higher Education Panel Report (Washington, D.C.: ACE, 1981), table D and figure 6, p. 8.

⁹ Allen, p. 27. See also his notes, esp. n. 14 to Ch. 2, p. 124.

¹⁰ “Working Paper of the Commission on the Future of the Profession: lnterim Recommendations and Responses,” Profession 81 (New York: MLA, 1981), pp. 1–12.

¹¹ Atelsek and Gomberg, Hiring Patterns , table 10, p. 19. This figure is for nonscience fields. In science and engineering, the corresponding figure is 38.2% (table 9, p. 18).

¹² Arthur M. Cohen, “Educating Teachers for New Times,” Change , Sept. 1976, p. 64; as cited in Hiring Patterns , p. 7.

¹³ Gertrude S. Fujii, “Those ‘Undertrained’ Ph.D.'s in English,” Chronicle of Higher Education , 23 Feb. 1981, p. 25.

¹⁴ Dieter P. Lotze, “Faculty Hiring Criteria-An MLA-NEH Study: Response,” paper delivered at the annual convention of the Northeast Modern Language Association, 4 April 1982, New York, ms., p. 3.

¹⁵ Kurt E. Müiller and Barbara E. Elling, ADFL Program: Faculty Hiring Criteria in Universities and in Two- and Four-Year Colleges , recording of a session at the Northeast Conference on the Teaching of Foreign Languages, 2 April 1982, cassette 12-16-82 (New York: Audio Transcripts, 1982).

¹⁶ Although teaching experience is one of the most desirable characteristics cited by our respondents, we must note that there is a sharp distinction between pre-Ph.D. and post-Ph.D. experience. The latter, especially in the form of a series of non-tenure-track appointments, seems to be a disadvantage to the candidate for a faculty position. Elling and Baker commented on this problem during the Northeast Conference session, and similar remarks surfaced during the discussion following the presentation of survey results during the ADFL Seminar East, at the University of Maryland, 11 June 1982.

© 1983 by the Association of Departments of Foreign Languages. All Rights Reserved.

ADFL Bulletin 14, no. 3 (March 1983): 43-50

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