The Forgotten- Some Stats on the Adjuncts, Lectures, and Instructors in Academic Archaeology

This is the forth post in a series looking at employment statistics of academic archaeologists in the US. This post deals with the non-full time, non-permanent, non-traditional academic archaeologists such instructors, adjunct faculty, lectures, researchers(includes the occasional post-doc), etc. This list also includes the occasional lab manager and skills instructor. From information on the other types of jobs click these links-

Assistant Professor

Associate Professor

Professor

Over all numbers

There are currently 468 temporary/non-tenure track archaeologists working at universities (see here for how these numbers were gathered). A very interesting finding was that about 7%+ did not actually have a PhD but had either an MA and in some cases a BA. Apparently you don’t need a graduate degree to work at some universities, however one of those BA’s was from 1956 so the person does have close to 60 years of experience, something to consider. It was also much harder to find information on these positions as many universities do not including a lot of information on their temp workers. Here is a break down of when they got their degrees.

No year given 50 1956 1 1960 1 1964 1 1967 2 1969 1 1970 1 1971 3 1972 2 1973 5 1974 2 1975 5 1976 3 1977 12 1978 3 1979 5 1980 8 1981 11 1982 4 1983 10 1984 12 1985 6 1986 15 1987 8 1988 7 1989 15 1990 10 1991 13 1992 8 1993 7 1994 9 1995 13 1996 12 1997 14 1998 20 1999 7 2000 11 2001 11 2002 11 2003 8 2004 15 2005 15 2006 11 2007 14 2008 19 2009 13 2010 21 2011 13

Not surprising those who got their degrees in the last few years hold a good portion of these positions (also 1998 for some reason), probably taking these jobs to pay the bills as they attempt to find more permanent employment. This group also tends to have a more diverse background with some of their terminal degrees coming from a diverse group of international universities.

Warsaw U 1 University of Western Ontario 1 University of Ovied 1 University of Glasgow 2 University of Calgary 2 University of Auckland 1 University of Alberta 2 Université de Bordeaux I 1 Universite de la Mediterranee Aix-Marsaille II 1 U Toronto 1 University College, London 4 Manchester Metropolitan University 1 Simon Fraser University 2 Leiden University 1 Hebrew University of Jerusalem 2 Cambridge University 3 Australian National University 1 Ankara U 1

However, the majority of terminal degrees (i.e. BA, MA, PhD which ever was the last degree they earned) came from US based universities-

Case Western Reserve University 1 Catholic University of America 1 CGP/SUCO 1 CIT 1 College of William and Mary 1 Colorado State University 1 Cornell University 1 CSULB 1 Deccan College, Pune 1 East Carolina University 1 Eastern New Mexico University 1 Emory University 1 George Washington 1 Georgia Institute of Technology 1 Hobart College 1 Idaho State University 1 Indiana State University 1 Iowa State University of Science and Technology 1 Minnesota State University 1 Montana State University 1 North Dakota State University 1 Ohio State University 1 Portland State University 1 Rutgers University 1 Sonoma State 1 Southern Illinois U-Edwardsville 1 St John Fisher 1 Stanford University 1 Stony Brook University 1 Texas State 1 Texas Tech 1 University at Albany 1 University of Buffalo 1 University of California- San Diego 1 University of Connecticut 1 University of Denver 1 University of Georgia 1 University of Hawaii-Manoa 1 University of Houston Clear Lake 1 University of Louisville 1 University of Maryland 1 University of Mississippi 1 University of Nevada-Reno 1 University of Texas-Pan American 1 University of Virginia 1 University of Wisconsin-La Crosse 1 Univiversit of Iowa 1 Vanderbilt University 1 Vermont College 1 Western Carolina University 1 Wichita State University 1 Ball State University 2 Bryn Mawr 2 Columbia University 2 Louisiana State University 2 Oregon State University 2 Sothern Methodist University 2 Temple University 2 University of Alabama 2 University of Alaska Fairbanks 2 University of California, Santa Barbara 2 University of Illinois-Chicago 2 University of Rhode Island 2 University of South Alabama 2 University of Texas-San Antonio 2 Brown 3 Florida State University 3 Hunter College (CUNY) 3 Kent State 3 State University of New York at Buffalo 3 Syracuse University 3 Tulane University 3 University of Cincinnati 3 University of Kansas 3 University of Nebraska 3 University of Utah 3 University of West Florida 3 University of Wyoming 3 Boston University 4 Northwestern University 4 University of Chicago 4 University of Iowa 4 University of Massachusetts Amherst 4 University of Pittsburgh 4 University of Tennessee, Knoxville 4 Yale University 4 Graduate School, CUNY 5 Harvard University 5 Indiana University 5 University of Idaho 5 University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign 5 University of Pennsylvania 5 University of Washington 5 University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee 5 Pennsylvania State University 6 Southern Illinois University, Carbondale 6 Texas A&M University 6 University of California, Los Angeles 6 University of California, Riverside 6 University of Minnesota 6 University of Colorado, Boulder 7 University of Missouri 7 University of New Mexico 7 University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill 7 University of Oregon 8 University of Texas at Austin 8 Michigan State University 9 University of Kentucky 9 University of Michigan 9 Washington University in St. Louis 9 University of Florida 10 University of Wisconsin-Madison 10 Washington State Univeristy 10 University of California, Berkeley 12 University of Arizona 14 State University of New York Binghamton. 15 Arizona State University 26 None listed 37

As would be expected a lot of the universities that provide a large number of permanent positions also provide the temp ones as well. I believe this is because these are large programs that produce lots of graduates and so lots of them end up with jobs in archaeology. Overall the numbers are not too surprising except for ASU, they provide a unusually large amount of temp. positions. However they also list 20 of these temp positions on their department website and 15 of them have ASU degrees. This means that the results are because of a reporting bias and not a death sentence for ASU grads with eyes on a permanent academic position.