You may have seen “No More Plan B,” in which AHA president Anthony Grafton and executive director Jim Grossman argue that it’s time to devote serious attention to preparing history grad students for jobs outside the professoriate.
You may also have seen the responses: one from grad student Dan Allosso, one from historian Rohan Maitzen, one from Tenured Radical, and a response-to-the-responses from Grafton and Grossman.
THATCamp AHA seems like the perfect place to discuss our own responses to this line of thought. I’m particularly interested in:
- what it means to prepare grad students for non-traditional careers. What has to change?
- what these careers might be.
- what the AHA’s role might be.
- whether this direction marks an accommodation to academic casualization, as some have argued (for example, in the comments here).
- how we might create mentoring and advocacy opportunities for history grad students who are dealing with this unsettling time for the profession.