The Changing Profile of Tenure-Track Faculty in Archaeology

Abstract

The goal for many PhD students in archaeology is tenure-track employment. Students primarily receive their training by tenure-track or tenured professors, and they are often tacitly expected—or explicitly encouraged—to follow in the footsteps of their advisor. However, the career trajectories that current and recent PhD students follow may hold little resemblance to the ones experienced by their advisors. To understand these different paths and to provide information for current PhD students considering pursuing a career in academia, we surveyed 438 archaeologists holding tenured or tenure-track positions in the United States. The survey, recorded in 2019, posed a variety of questions regarding the personal experiences of individual professors. The results are binned by the decade in which the respondent graduated. Evident patterns are discussed in terms of change over time. The resulting portraits of academic pathways through the past five decades indicate that although broad commonalities exist in the qualifications of early career academics, there is no singular pathway to obtaining tenure-track employment. We highlight the commonalities revealed in our survey to provide a set of general qualifications that might provide a baseline set of skills and experiences for an archaeologist seeking a tenure-track job in the United States.

Ready or Not

“…Others sought candidates with either a master's or doctorate ( n = 14); a master's, with preference for a doctorate ( n = 7); a bachelor's, with preference for a doctorate ( n = 1); or a bachelor's, master's, or doctorate ( n = 6). There has been much discussion about the anthropology/archaeology doctorate in recent years (Cramb et al 2022; Marshall 2020; Speakman et al 2018). Wurst (2019:172) summarizes, “The discipline also continues to produce PhDs at an alarming rate, increasing the production of professionals unlikely to find jobs suitable for their qualifications.” As Speakman and colleagues (2018:1–7) explain, “Over the past 30 years, the number of US doctoral anthropology graduates has increased by about 70%, but there has not been a corresponding increase in the availability of new faculty positions .…”

Gender, Institutional Inequality, and Institutional Diversity in Archaeology Articles in Major Journals and Sapiens

“…Among US anthropology departments, the top 15% account for 52.8% of tenure-track anthropology professors (all subfields; Kawa et al 2019). Looking at archaeology specifically, the top 15% of US programs account for 48.3% of tenure-track archaeology professors who received their degrees from 1994 to 2014 (Cramb et al 2022; Speakman et al 2018:Supplemental Table 1). Our dissertation database (Supplemental Table 3) allows us to add that the programs with the 48.3% market share produced 30.7% of all PhDs awarded in these years.…”

An Intersectional Approach to Equity, Inequity, and Archaeology

“…However, for the individual, we emphasize how one navigates the world and how past experiences and relationships with others have shaped this process. Privilege and predisposition to minoritization based on an individual's identity is situationally dependent, and certain groups of people hold privilege in archaeology—for example, white cis-men and cis-women are dominant in the field (Strategies 360 2020) and particularly in tenure-track employment (Cramb et al 2022). The experiences of people with privileged identities are integrated into the discipline in covert and overt ways.…”