Those Doctoral Dilemmas

The M.L.A. conference is exercised over unemployment

Once they were erudite conclaves, giant, annual movable salons in which men and women could come and go, talking of interrobangs and Michelangelo. But last week, when 9,000 scholars gathered in Chicago for the 92nd convention of the Modern Language Association, the proceedings at times took on the character of a longshoremen's dock shape-up. With so few jobs now opening up in colleges and so many hungry young Ph.D.s in desperate need of positions, the job-market function of the M.L.A. threatened to upstage the intellectual encounter of linguists, English literature and foreign-language professors who make up the M.L.A. 's membership. TIME Education Editor Annalyn Swan and Reporter Ellie McGrath were on hand to observe:

Tuesday afternoon, in the elegant, ornately chandeliered lobby of the Palmer House, and in the nearby Conrad Hilton, English professors in herringbone jackets, with copies of Goethe or Guenter Grass occasionally protruding from their pockets, chatter about irony, ambiguity and Erich Auerbach's theories of mimesis. A babble of French and German and Spanish fills the air. Nervous young Ph.D. candidates whiz past, heading for the Job Information Center on the fourth floor of Palmer House, where a giant board carries notices of late-breaking job openings. An October bulletin had listed only 375 job openings and "possible" job openings in English and language departments for next fall, down from 440 last year. Each listing drew from 100 to as high as 500 application letters and resumes. Those whose letters failed to win them advance appointments for interviews at the convention must now press for one, while the happy few who succeeded line up impatiently to learn where their interviews will take place. Candidates' names have to be verified against a master sheet before the room number of the department chairman who is conducting the interview is divulged. "If Yale registered its suite," explains Roy Chustek, who runs the job center, "they'd have people camping out in the hallway, pushing resumes under the door and through the air vents."

By 4 p.m. the crowd at the center has vanished, to reconvene at a special session cheerfully entitled "Suggestions for Job Seekers" but full of depressing statistics. Of the 1,094 Ph.D.s created last year in English and 753 in languages, we learn only 42% and 46%, respectively, have landed steady teaching positions. "Ten years ago, anybody who didn't have a job by Jan. 15 would look in the mirror to see if he had leprosy," comments Jasper Neel, director of the M.L.A.'s English programs. "Now there won't be an upturn of Ph.D. hiring in this century. The birth rate is dropping, and people hired in the boom years of the 1960s have 15 to 30 more years to teach." The only faintly promising news concerns writing courses, once considered dreary and even declasse assignments. Now colleges all over the country are bringing back more or less rigorous composition requirements, and a number of job openings in new writing programs do blossom occasionally.

Most of Wednesday and Thursday, candidates stand four-deep around the job-listing board. Others sit tensely on the fringes of the interview area. A pleasant-faced Indiana University candidate confesses that she has managed only two interviews so far, and this is her second year at submitting resumes. "What's your field?" she whispers to another hopeful. "Restoration," he replies, "but this interview is not in my field." "Mine either," she replies, "I'm a medievalist."

Upstairs in the small meeting rooms, the M.L.A.'s traditional intellectual business goes on pretty much as usual, with over 700 sessions devoted to topics both arcane and trendy. In Parlor B of Palmer House, for instance, an attentive, largely gray-haired, gray-suited audience listens to William Youngren of Boston College expound on "Dr. Johnson, Joseph Wharton and a 'Theory of Particularity.' " In another, a panel of women professors bears down on "Sexism and Racism in Shakespeare" to an overwhelmingly female audience. But concern for the tremendous Ph.D. glut has invaded even these rarefied environs. At least a dozen sessions are devoted to the problem. At one, an angry panelist accuses senior faculty of callously taking on more and more graduate students in order to free themselves from lowly teaching assignments, even though the students have no hope of finding later placement in the profession. At another session, titled "Should Half the Ph.D. Programs Be Abolished?" Speaker Fred Tarpley of East Texas State University remarks, "From what I hear in the corridors, most people would say yes." He advocates an early warning system to turn off English Ph.D. candidates before they are too deeply committed to a career in teaching.

Downstairs two middle-aged professors drift past the job center, speaking of the relationship between metaphors and real life. A girl with waist-length hair passes them with tears in her eyes. The convention is almost over, and she has failed to arrange a single interview. "There's got to be a better way of doing this," sighs a Wisconsin Ph.D. candidate. "Half the people here are enjoying themselves because they are secure in their jobs." He stares nervously as a department head who has just interviewed him passes by without a sign of recognition. "For the rest, M.L.A. is a question of do or die."

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