Comments on: Session proposal: No More Plan B?

By: Jill Anderson

Jill Anderson — Thu, 05 Jan 2012 01:13:17 +0000

Jeffrey McClurken’s point about people in other fields having concerns about PhDs entering their already tight fields is an important one. (I say this as a fairly new librarian who went back to school to get an MLS 7 years after the history PhD). This blog post gives a good overview of that transition: sarantakes.blogspot.com/2009/10/blog-xxxi-history-phd-as-libarian.html

There is definitely some resentment of PhDs, not necessarily across the board, but it is there. This controversy erupted last spring, worth looking at for how some librarians talk about PhDs in libraries: scienceblogs.com/confessions/2011/05/mcmastergate_in_chronological.php (blog post is a roundup of responses to a university library’s director’s controversial stance re apparently hiring PhDs over MLS-degreed librarians).

By: Amanda French

Amanda French — Tue, 03 Jan 2012 13:06:00 +0000

I love this, because I always think that grown-up professionals have too few chances to get together and discuss texts the way we did so often in school. I made up a THATCamp session genre once called a “Readathon,” but it was kind of a failure because in a non-hierarchical structure you can’t assign people reading, so no one did the reading beforehand. 🙂 Still, when it’s a piece that probably a lot of people have already read, like the Grafton piece, and if people are willing to summarize for and forgive those who haven’t read it (or give them time to read it in the session!), then I think it’ll be a smash.

So go all seminar on this thing!

By: Jeffrey McClurken

Jeffrey McClurken — Tue, 03 Jan 2012 01:17:50 +0000

This sounds like a terrific session. I’m particularly interested in discussing how history programs might work in conjunction with other programs and fields outside of traditional history to train students for multiple jobs.

One of the responses to Grafton and Grossman’s proposal has been from people and schools in those other fields who are a little concerned about a flood of history PhD’s headed the way of their own tight job markets.

Looking forward to this one.