ABSTRACT
The Job System (th\ «ja‹b «sist\Ú m) Marc Bousquet, former head of the MLA’s Graduate Student Caucus and now a faculty member at the University of Louisville, recently suggested to us that there really is no job market in English, and we agree. Bousquet and other members of the MLA’s Graduate Student Caucus would argue that there is really a job system in higher education, not a job market. Certainly the standard model of supply and demand is inapplicable for several reasons:
1. Supply and demand in higher education are so thoroughly out of sync with each other that the product being marketed-the new Ph.D.—has become almost valueless. 2.The supply of new Ph.D.’s and the demand for full-time faculty in the higher education job system are not a function of need-or even dynamically interdependent-but are rather each independent variables shaped by quite different social and political forces. 3.The forces shaping supply and demand for new Ph.D.’s are not exclusively or even necessarily primarily economic but rather cultural and institutional. 4. The supply of candidates has been artificially increased and the demand for full-time employees artificially depressed. This is not a simple economic relationship, though new Ph.D.’s are suffering the classic economic consequences of dramatic oversupply.
