OK, so I’ve now had time to look at the MLA Job List on detail and here are the results. I only looked at tenure-track positions and didn’t count double appointments like “French and Spanish.” There is such a plethora of positions that nobody really needs these weird suckers. I skipped the joint positions between foreign languages and Women’s Studies or other fields. I also didn’t count the jobs in Canada because there are so many I got tired.
So here are the TT positions offered. I might have missed a few because there are so many but I only chose the ones that specifically offered tenure-track positions and didn’t leave any room for doubt.
Spanish leads, of course, with 160 job offerings.
French comes second with a whopping 105 TT jobs.
German is doing well with 33 positions and Russian follows with 32 tenure-track openings.
Italian is the smallest field with 19.
I don’t know what everybody is whining about with such a robust number of positions.
Just one small thing, though. This is the MLA job list published in the Fall of 1989. I chose it completely at random not knowing what the results would be. And now I kind of wish I kept not knowing.
If anybody wants to see the numbers for 2014, please go here.
P.S. The numbers for 2014:
German – 9
Russian – 9
Italian – 3
French – 15
Spanish – 57
Chinese – 5
Arabic – 5
Clarissa's Blog 
What are the current numbers? I looked at My Analysis of the MLA Job List and your earlier post. I did not see any numbers in the post on the current job market. Also, what are the numbers for Arabic, Japanese, Chinese, and Farsi.
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2014: German – 9
Russian – 9
Italian – 3
French – 15
Spanish – 57
Chinese – 5
Arabic – 5
Didn’t see anything on Japanese.
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That’s utterly depressing. It used to be bad, but now it’s beyond that, and far, far beyond.
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Every single day somebody comes up to me to ask what’s going on in Ukraine and Russia. And I’m a Hispanist! I spend all day lecturing about Eastern Europe in between my actual lectures on Spain. And you know why? Because our Russian program is dead. Some geniuses fucking decided that “the Cold War” was over and now nobody fucking needed a fucking Russian program anywhere on the continent. And now nobody – including our president – fucking knows what the fuck is going on in Russia.
Brilliant move. Brilliant.
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What’s this about not decreasing the number of tt positions?
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I haven’t researched how many TT jobs in “Institutional Leadership” and Co existed back in 1989 but I can volunteer a guess.
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Next there will be TT positions in “Gaming equality”…
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I tried inventing something stupid to continue the joke but then realized that when a graduate program in Community Building exists, I’m impotent to offer anything better.
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All I can say is that sometimes I’m embarassed for the sheer fucking hubris of my country.
Messing around (and screwing up) Arab countries and they can’t even be bothered to make sure there are experts who know the fucking language? (same goes for Russia).
How can US foreign policy be anything but a trainwreck with such idiocy as a guiding principle?
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Good rhetorical trick: I was already wondering what you’d been smoking
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I wish there were something I could smoke to make this look better. What a disgrace.
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Slightly off topic, I’m sort of surprised to see that French (the traditional #2) is only slightly ahead of German (the traditional #3). I remember an old German professor making the observation that French numbers (enrollments, size of faculty, etc…) in any given situation were always at least double and usually triple the numbers in German. That is true in the 1989 numbers, slightly more than triple, and I’ve seen that double to triple ratio again and again over the years. But recently I noticed that French enrollments at my university are only 20% or so above German. I think German has been holding steady and the French numbers are way down. Forgive the business speak, but is French losing “market share” in US higher ed?
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“Forgive the business speak, but is French losing “market share” in US higher ed?”
– Yes, it is. 😦 At my university, we are not sure if French is going to survive at all. Our German is not going anywhere but the death of our French seems only a matter of time. :-((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((( And we have already lost our Russian. Our Italian is barely surviving and only because wealthy Italians are donating money and contributing to the maintenance.
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That is sad. I don’t think French or any other language program is facing death at my university. But it is clear that in most programs tenure-track lines are going to be replaced by full time lecturers who teach twice as many courses for less pay. I can’t imagine that Russian, Italian, or Portuguese will ever get another TT position when the current faculty retire.
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This is depressing news and I won’t deny that. But there is a small glimmer of hope…….. many many schools don’t have their budget lines cleared yet. We are now seeing only the very first round of MLA ads and some schools are not quite ready to advertise.
For instance, my institution typically posts job ads in November because our budget line is cleared in October because we are tuition driven and can’t really know our budget until the first day of school in September. (Sorry for the clumsy previous sentence!) Sometimes we even post tenure track jobs in January or later. And we aren’t terribly unique. There are many schools that have a slightly different budget timeline than the JIL. So I feel sure that the number of ads will grow in the next 4-6 weeks.
New ads get posted to the JIL every Friday. I am going to check regularly. Not because I need a job but because I so badly want our profession to survive and flourish. Here’s to hoping it gets better!
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— I also didn’t count the jobs in Canada because there are so many I got tired.
That’s where I knew you are messing with us… 🙂
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There was a separate section on Canadian jobs back in those times. In size, it was 1/3 of the American jobs list. Today, Canada is easy to calculate: it offers zero jobs in any and all languages.
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