In a paper in press in American Antiquity, Speakman
and colleagues (2017) present some data about which archaeology programs in the
US and Canada have been most successful at placing their graduates over the
past 40 years or so. They conclude that “success in obtaining a faculty
position upon graduation is predicated in large part on where one attends
graduate school” and that “success in landing a faculty position begins the
moment one applies for graduate school” because “being accepted into a top
program, as well as the reputation of scholars in that program… really does
make a difference.” To me (and for them), these overall conclusions are
unsurprising, though it is nice to see impressions and rules of thumb being
backed up with some hard numbers. In a nutshell, if you’re interested in being
an archaeology prof in North America, you better graduate from Michigan, Arizona, Berkeley,
UPenn, ASU, Harvard, TAMU, UCSB, Chicago or UNM, in that order, since these are
the ten North American programs in their “tier I”. The second tier also does
pretty well in placing grads, and it comprises UCLA, Florida, Pitt, UT
Austin, Wisconsin, Tennessee, OSU, UNC Chapel Hill and Virginia.
The authors
indicate some readers might be uncomfortable with their approach which divided the
110 North American universities in their sample into six tiers (I, II, III, IV,
V, and 0), based on the number of their grads who have secured a faculty
position. I’m personally not too bothered by it, as I think this is a rather apt
reading of the data they present, rather than a direct judgement of the quality
of the faculty in these different programs.
What did
strike me, from my position as an archaeology professor at a Canadian university, is how these trends don’t quite
seem to jive with the reality of the Canadian market. Based on the data presented,
Canadian program are not particuarly great at placing their graduates into
faculty positions. The Canadian institutions they list are, in decreasing order
of success, McMaster (Tier III – 8 grads placed in 20 years), Calgary (Tier III
– 6 grads), followed by Alberta, McGill and Toronto (all
three in Tier IV, tied with four grads each), Simon Fraser University (Tier V, 2 grads), and
finally UBC, Manitoba and Montréal in Tier 0, meaning programs that haven’t
placed a single grad between 1994 and 2014.
Looking at
this from a Canadian perspective, I was struck that this list excluded two Canadian
universities with dedicated Archaeology programs leading to the PhD, namely
Memorial University and Université Laval, though this is likely a result of the
bias the authors themselves bring up about the completeness of the AAA
AnthroGuide from which they gathered most of their data. Also excluded is the
new PhD program at the University of Victoria, which didn’t exist for the
period the authors consider.
Additionally,
my admittedly subjective impression is that there are a proportionally a lot more archaeology
faculty trained at Canadian institutions hired into Canadian program. In the
database provided as part of the article’s supplementary material, only 59 of
the 1084 (or 5.4%) archaeology faculty listed obtained their PhDs from Canadian
programs; this drops to 4.6% (or 28/608) if you consider only those PhDs
awarded between 1994 and 2014. This is much lower than my gut feeling of
the proportion of Canadian-trained archaeologists is in actuality in most
Canadian programs. For instance, at UdeM, out of our seven archaeology and
bioarchaeology faculty, two (so 28.4%) received their PhD from Canadian
institutions (actually, Québec, in this case); these figures will have to be adjusted next year, following the hire of a public archaeologist we're currently advertising for. Looking more broadly, at SFU, out of 16 tenured/tenure-track
faculty listed on their website, fully 8 (50%) come from Canadian institutions,
while neighboring UBC has 2/6 (33%) graduates from Canadian programs. At the
other end of the country, at MUN’s archaeology department 7/11 (63.6%) tenured/tenure-track
faculty listed received their doctorate from a Canadian program. The disparity between these numbers and the overall representation of Canadian PhDs in archaeology programs in North America as a whole is pretty staggering.
There are a
couple of ways to think about this trend. On the one hand, it is probably not
terribly surprising, considering that, by law, priority is given to Canadian
citizens for positions in Canada; insofar as having a Canadian PhD is loosely correlated with being a Canadian citizen, this probably reflects that
fact up to a degree. Likewise, scholars working on topics in Canadian archaeology are more
likely to be trained in Canada and, in turn, to be appealing to Canadian
programs wanting specialists in these issues. The flipside of both these
considerations, of course, is that correspondingly fewer Canadian-trained
archaeologists must serve as faculty in US archaeology programs, which would
have the effect of depressing the already low representation of Canadian
programs south of the border. Whether it also has the effect of creating a
distinctive Canadian archaeological tradition is an open question; I would
surmise that it doesn’t, considering the level of methodological and
theoretical integration that currently characterizes the field, but this is just an impression. That said,
these (admittedly partial) data suggest one thing rather clearly: if you want
to teach archaeology in Canada, receiving a PhD in archaeology from a Canadian
program would appear to give your chances a serious boost.
References:
Speakman,
R.J., C.S. Hadden, M.H. Colvin, J. Cramb, K.C. Jones, T.W. Jones, C.L. Kling,
I. Lulewicz, K.G. Napora, K.L. Reinberger, B.T. Ritchison, M.J. Rivera-Araya,
A.K. Smith and V.D. Thompson. 2017. Choosing a path to the ancient world in a
modern market: The reality of faculty jobs in archaeology. American Antiquity: https://doi.org/10.1017/aaq.2017.36.
