Thank you, Ottfried, for posing this question to our list.  It would be
nice to continue this discussion a bit, as I know that at least in the
United States the topic of "The Status of the Profession" has begun to
generate a lot of important scholarly activity.  Some of the
"foundational"  publications of the last few years that I would recommend
include the following: 

	_The University in Ruins_ by Bill Readings (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
UP, 1996).

	_The Employment of English_ by Michael Berube (New York:  New York
UP, 1998).

	_Manifesto of a Tenured Radical_ by Cary Nelson (New York:  New
York UP, 1997). 

The most important article I have read of late that has to do with the
specific problems of employment in the foreign languages is Dorothy James'
"Bypassing the Traditional Leadership:  Who's minding the Store?" 
in PROFESSION (1997).  This article generated an intense discussion in the
pages of the latest issue of the ADFL journal. 

There are also some excellent articles in the January/ February 1998 issue
of ACADEME, which is devoted to the threat that increasing reliance
on part-time and non-tenure track appointments pose to the future of our
profession. 

I invite you all to visit the pages of a new on-line academic journal
sponsored by the MLA's Graduate Student Caucus (WORKPLACE).  In its first
issue, there are several articles which discuss the Modern Language
Association's Committee on Professional Employment Final Report.  The CPE
Report was mailed to all members of the MLA this spring, and contains a
number of recommendations on what individual departments can due to help
ease pressure on job seekers.  It is an important document, one which we
should all read carefully, and which we may wish to discuss here.  The
report can be obtained from the MLA:  send an e-mail to
<[log in to unmask]> or telephone 212/614-6382. The address for WORKPLACE
is <www.workplace-gsc.com>. 

And I just saw this week two new websites that are devoted to related
issues:

	http://humanitas.ucsb.edu/depts/english/altcareers/index.html

This site will give links to employment opportunities for those who
are open to the idea of pursuing an "alternative career."  The idea is to
assist you in your job search for a non-academic job.

And:

	http://humanitas.ucsb.edu/liu/palinurus/

Which is a web site put up by NASSR (??) the group of scholars devoted to
Romanticism (Sorry, I can't remember the name of the group).  They had a
lively discussion on their list this spring on the problem of "downsizing"
the university and the web site is a product of what appears to be growing
concern over the serious long-term implications of the job market crisis.

	Because tenure-track lines are continuing to disappear at an ever
more depressing rate.  This week's issue of the Chronicle of Higher
Education reports the MLA's most recent bad news:  Placement rates for
newly-minted Ph.D.s have dropped from 45% to 33% in English, and the
figures are probably just as bad in the foreign languages.  This means
that in the last decade the percent of PhD candidates who are finding
full-time tenure track jobs has dropped from less that half to almost one
third.

	The problem, as most of you who have thought about this probably
no doubt know, is that the administrators of American Universities are
slowly and inexorably eliminating the tenure system, and our working
conditions (if we are lucky enough to hold a tenured position) are
deteriorating rapidly:  the few of us who hold tenured position are
supervising an army of underpaid and exploited adjuncts.

	I recently spoke with Antonia Arslan (U of Padova) about this
problem while she was visiting New York, and found that what she had to
say about working conditions at Italian universities is equally alarming. 

	The most serious problem we face in all of this, however, is our
tendency to carry on with our research and teaching activities as if our
profession were not in a state of crisis.  It is time, I think, that we
ask ourselves to what degree we are contributing to the demise of our
profession by continuing to admit large numbers of PhD candidates into our
programs when we know that only one-third of the students in our programs
(after 80% of our students have already dropped out on their way to the
PhD) will find tenure track jobs their first year on the job market.  Keep
in mind that the MLA's statistics only account for a small cross-section
of the PhD holders who are actually looking for a job.  The placement
rates, when you start adding all of the candidates who start looking for a
job before their dissertation is finished and all of those who stay on the
market year after year, are probably close to 10-20 per cent.

	The question is, as Cary Nelson has put it, whether we are not all
fiddling while Rome burns.

	Again, thank you, Ottfried, for voicing your frustration with the
lack of decent tenure-track openings this year.  I was sort of hoping that
we would broach this issue.  And I'd like to hear from others who are
struggling with the job market outside of the U.S., as I think we need to
see ourselves, as intellectual laborers, as both contributing and
suffering from an increasingly heartbreaking state of affairs on an
international level.

In solidarity,

Mary Refling
Modern Languages Dept.
Fordham University



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