Guest Editor's Introduction: Finding the Open Doors: Training and Advising Music PhDs Through Various Career Paths

In memory of Charles Hiroshi Garrett, who, with Carol Oja, made the previously published chapter on this topic in Sounding Together possible. He was a true musicological Avenger.Among the many challenges universities face, one of the most visceral to graduate students and their mentors is employment following one's doctoral education. After five, six, seven, or more years, the sudden challenge of figuring out what's next can feel like a seismic and precarious shift. Some recent PhDs may carry a sense of commitment or obligation to apply for tenure-track jobs, even for multiple years, until they are successful. Others may decide their best choice is to leave academic institutions, perhaps after experiencing or witnessing the physical and mental tolls of a system that can allocate resources unequally, permit abuses of power, or define labor as capriciously as it chooses.A basic fact of all PhD programs, though, is their apprenticeship model, where students’ primary supervisors are university faculty members who have all gone through the system to be where they are, even if there were twists and turns along the way. This model dominates higher education in the United States and across the world and, due to its self-reinforcing nature, can stigmatize those apprentices who do not follow in their teachers’ similar footsteps.Nevertheless, some pioneering faculty members have devised and championed more holistic approaches to graduate study. They've designed such programs to encompass not only completing coursework, teaching, and writing a dissertation but also to include other professional opportunities, which can encourage wide-ranging job searches upon degree conferral, especially when the number of graduating PhDs vastly outstrips the number of tenure-track jobs.This colloquy addresses American Music's thematic and topical interest in “careers and vocations in American music-making and scholarship” or, broadly, how we teach and approach doctoral training in music studies in the Americas. It picks up on a chapter that Naomi André and I published in 2021, “Finding Success Inside and Outside the Academy,” as a contribution to Charles Hiroshi Garrett and Carol Oja's Sounding Together: Collaborative Perspectives on U.S. Music in the 21st Century. In that chapter, André and I shared some of our personal experiences in completing our PhDs as graduate students of color. We also discussed our career paths, with André’s first teaching position at a music school in a Big Ten university in the 1990s and with my nonconventional path of pursuing a primarily administrative and student-affairs position with a nontenure-track teaching assignment.1 On top of navigating the job markets, we both wrote about a lack of role models of color, racialized and minoritized experiences, and feelings of not belonging. Not only did we discuss our personal experiences, but we also provided hard data on the numbers of musicology/ethnomusicology PhD graduates every year compared to the number of ladder faculty openings, from 2013 to 2016.We compiled data from several sources, including Humanities Indicators (a project of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences with the National Endowment for the Humanities NEH, the American Council of Learned Societies ACLS, and the National Humanities Alliance) and the Survey of Earned Doctorates (SED), funded in part by the National Science Foundation and conducted by NORC.2 The Humanities Indicators counted roughly 1,200 graduate students in “musicology” in 2013, with eighty departments in primarily research universities averaging roughly 15.6 students and about 150 new musicology PhDs each year.3 By comparison, only seventy new hires that year happened for “tenured, tenure-track, or permanent faculty positions” in the field.4 SED data confirmed similar numbers through 2017, even with the challenges of comparing its groupings of musicology, ethnomusicology, music theory, and composition.Both of these sources verified the decades-long problem of finding a tenure-track job in the humanities and in music studies. They corroborated the Mellon Foundation's earlier analysis of tenure-track jobs (before 2008) that only 30 percent of graduating humanities PhDs were employed in tenure-track positions at four-year colleges and universities six months after graduation and that the number only improved to 52 percent three years after graduation.In this introduction, I update the Humanities Indicators and SED data once more to their most recent sets, up to 2023, including the initial years of the COVID-19 pandemic. The main objective of this colloquy, however, is to bring more voices into the conversation, from Project Spectrum (“a graduate-student led coalition committed to increasing diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility” in music studies)5 to current tenured and tenure-track faculty, the dean of a music conservatory, and a higher education consultant. Each share their perspectives on the state of, struggles with, and opportunities from PhD studies in musicology, ethnomusicology, and music theory. What are the skills and knowledge one attains? How does doctoral research inform and obstruct future career paths? And what are the experiences for students and faculty of color in particular? All of these contributions provide further tools and frameworks to understand career paths inside and outside academia, skills attainment, degree completion, and employment paths. We address this colloquy to a wide music studies audience, including students, junior and senior scholars, university administrators, and employers outside of academia.As of this writing in March 2025, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences Humanities Indicators has published the third iteration of its Humanities Departmental Survey (HDS-3), going through the academic year 2017–2018 (HDS-2 covered up to 2012 and HDS-4 forthcoming will go through 2022). The most recent SED goes through the year 2023. Until HDS-4 is published, only SED will provide data from the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 and later. The lack of the most current statistics, however, should not stop us from tackling the job market problem. While Humanities Indicators have unique workforce, job preparation, and graduate training data, SED provides unique racial and ethnic categories for graduating PhDs. The racial and ethnic data, however, are only available for US citizens and permanent residents and not for international or undocumented students. The Project Spectrum contribution highlights some of the problems that result from such invisibility.In our 2021 publication, André and I noted that musicology programs ranked last among humanities divisions offering training and education for the job market outside academia.6 Danielle Fosler-Lussier points out that such offerings can also happen in joint efforts across departments, which may be more cost-effective and acknowledge common struggles throughout the humanities. At the same time, HDS-3 gives a more positive situation, with musicology programs on average doing better than other humanities departments in providing “occupationally oriented presentations by employers, employees, or alumni” (60 percent musicology vs. 54 percent other departments), “occupationally oriented coursework or workshops” (80 percent vs. 61 percent), and “an internship in an employment setting” (40 percent, matching the humanities average). While fewer than 10 percent of departments required these activities, the data show a greater awareness among musicology departments about the job market and the need for wider preparation.7In terms of the number of graduating music PhDs compared to the number of tenure-track and tenured job openings, however, the picture is even bleaker. In 2013, there were roughly 150 graduating PhDs in musicology competing for 70 new musicology faculty hires—by comparison, in 2017, there were roughly 112 graduating PhDs competing for 35 new faculty hires.8 In other words, while the number of finishing musicology graduate students declined by a quarter, the number of musicology new faculty hires declined by half. These numbers are the most current available, showing the aftereffects of the 2008 Great Recession, while data on the COVID-19 pandemic are still forthcoming. Moreover, these numbers do not consider the backlog of applicants who completed their PhDs in prior years and were on the job market for multiple cycles.SED data through 2023 further show that the underrepresentation of racial and ethnic minorities persists in music PhD programs across the board.9 In table 1, I combine the SED data from 2017 to 2023, and in table 2,10 I include data from the most recent year, 2023. Readers may observe that the numbers and percentages in each racial or ethnic group do not add up to the total of doctorate recipients, which is a result of various factors, such as some graduates not selecting a racial or ethnic category and the data excluding “temporary visa holders” (not to mention undocumented students) from racial and ethnic categories. Only after 2016 did the SED include the categories “more than one race,” “temporary visa holders,” and “total US citizens and permanent residents.”In our previous work, André and I also discussed the additional challenges faced by graduate students of color, including overt and covert discrimination, a lack of mentors and role models of color, and under resourcing. Several of these experiences are echoed in this colloquy's contributions, especially those of Brandi Neal and the members of Project Spectrum. (Katherine Lee, former tenured professor and now career strategist, also discusses many of these issues in her podcast Rise with Clarity.11) For all graduate students, however, there remains great uncertainty around what they will do with arts and humanities PhDs following graduation. According to Humanities Indicators and SED, in 2020, fewer than half of new arts and humanities PhDs (47 percent) had a job commitment at the time of graduation.12 While this percentage was higher than 2016 (41 percent), it was much lower than new PhDs in 1990 (63 percent), showing the trajectory of a decades-long trend. With the future of higher education facing even greater uncertainty, even more must be learned and done to advise and prepare PhD graduates, not to mention ensure the survival of the humanities in ethical and productive ways.The contributors to this colloquy come from a range of backgrounds and experiences and include current graduate students, faculty members, an administrator, and a consultant. With input and recommendations from the American Music editorial board, I invited colloquy participants to submit a 2,000- to 4,000-word essay of any format or style based on the topics of music studies PhD training, various employment paths, and faculty mentorship. Some chose more formal approaches while others took more personal ones. While we aimed for a broad representation of voices, a future colloquy could certainly explore further areas of this multifaceted, complex challenge in higher education. Perspectives from those who have participated in the Society for American Music's Career Connections resource, the American Musicological Society's Sustainable Mentorship Program, and the Society for Ethnomusicology's Mentoring Program, for example, would be invaluable.Coauthored articles bookend this colloquy, the first cowritten by Danielle Fosler-Lussier and Stacy Hartman who together led “Mentoring Grad Students Toward Many Possible Futures” workshops for the American Musicological Society in November 2023 and February 2024 and the final article cowritten by members of Project Spectrum.13 Fosler-Lussier and Hartman highlight steps individual advisers can take to advise students more holistically as well as two larger department-level PhD curricular reforms at the Ohio State University (in anthropology) and Brandeis University (in English). Project Spectrum reminds readers that graduate students of diverse backgrounds can experience and understand “graduate labor” differently than “simply business,” especially international students and students conducting fieldwork. Both articles emphasize the importance of listening to, and directly addressing, student needs, which are different today than they were even two decades ago. As Hartman writes in a separate article with Heather Hewett for ACLS, “take seriously the expressed needs of your students.”14The middle articles by Brandi Neal, Marysol Quevedo, and Bill Quillen offer the personal experiences of those who navigated music PhD programs and ended up in different places within academia, as an assistant teaching professor at a public university, a tenured associate professor of music at a private university, and a dean of a conservatory. While the authors write about their individual experiences, common themes emerge surrounding professional opportunities they cultivated outside of PhD coursework and the dissertation: that the professoriate was one option of several, that these opportunities helped them be better teachers and administrators, and that there is rarely a smooth or idealized career path in academia, even as hindsight can distort the real anxieties and obstacles one faced in the past. These connections emerge in this colloquy in part because of my invitation to contributors who have had noteworthy paths to where they are now in academia, but I suspect that the experiences recounted here are representative of many scholars’ trajectories and that these scholars’ advice is invaluable to all readers.Additional connections emerge from the bookend articles with those in the middle. The important role of faculty advisors that Quillen and Quevedo discuss in their accounts mirror the admonitions encouraged by Fosler-Lussier and Hartman. Neal's letter to graduate students about questions they might ask themselves, including how one can process feelings of isolation, unarticulated expectations, or having a different “background,” connects with several of the issues raised by Project Spectrum on minoritized students’ experiences. Neal's version of the “sunk cost fallacy” is the flip side of Fosler-Lussier and Hartman's reference to “vocational awe,” which are both factors in higher education's structural intransigence to change, or the view that going on the job market is simply a rite of passage through which all must pass. Quillen also writes of an “identity shift” that happened for him, while Quevedo is honest about the very practical needs of employment as she navigated what came next.On a personal note, I will share that I also connected with many of these stories as a graduate student who first went on the job market in 2017. Failing to receive a single interview, I nonetheless was fortunate to find a full-time job doing what I had previously done as an interim employee. The experiences and skills I gained during those six years of my first job helped me attain my current position, as a pretenure associate professor and director of a research center, while I also admit that I was ambivalent about reentering the job market in 2024. I hope in my current position I can practice what all of these contributors recommend.As Fosler-Lussier and Hartman point out, there are many humanities PhD resources that readers can consult, whether they are graduate students, faculty supervisors, university administrators, or nonacademic employers. As is commonplace in any evolving field, some of the resources André and I compiled in our 2021 chapter are outdated or are no longer operating. Some projects, like the ACLS's Public Fellows Program, which ran from 2011 to 2020 and placed 190 fellows with nonprofit organizations and government jobs, have turned into other programs, such as the Leading Edge Fellowship, which places fellows in jobs that promote social justice.15Most recently, ACLS announced on January 14, 2025, its collaboration with the NEH called “Graduate Education in the Humanities: A National Convening,” a three-year initiative (2025–2028) “to assess and reform humanities graduate education” in partnership with the American Historical Association (AHA), Modern Language Association (MLA), and Society of Biblical Literature.16 AHA and the American Philosophical Association (APA) continue to provide resources such as the AHA “Career Diversity for Historians” and “The Career Diversity Five Skills” toolkit and the APA “Beyond the Academy.”17 On the other hand, the MLA's Connected Academics is no longer active, and the NEH concluded its program Next Generation Humanities PhD. The NEH's own future as a government agency is gravely uncertain.Even as this colloquy goes to print, not only music studies but also the arts and humanities and higher education in general may look very different than they did a year ago. Nonetheless, if students, faculty, staff, researchers, organizers, and employers work together and execute their own responsibilities and duties as best they can, both incremental and large-scale change is possible. For the sake of our individual and collective well-being as researchers, scholars, and educators, and the future of humanistic learning and application, business cannot resume as usual.