The academic job market for linguistics is highly competitive and hierarchical: where one attains their PhD has a significant impact on their prospects for attaining a tenure track position in the field. In this session Haugen and Margaris will review and update findings from our 2020 LSA poster presentation on the faculty composition of PhD-granting departments of linguistics. We’ll present a ranking of linguistics PhD programs by the number of alumni each program has placed into the linguistics academic market (“market share”) and a network visualization showing where current linguistic faculty received their PhDs. Finally, we’ll offer some data on (inferred) gender distributions in tenure-track linguistics jobs that might provide a jumping-off point for discussions of gender and equity-related concerns in the discipline more widely. Nancy Frishberg will join in with a different lens: How do departments account for their Career Linguists as alumni/ae? by looking at 2 departments at the 50 year mark.
Presenters: Jason Haugen & Amy Margaris (Oberlin College)
Moderator: Nancy Frishberg