Alan Taylor: belief

Transcript context

…What is it you tell graduate students in history, or what should we tell them? Do you tell them, “Your chance of getting a good job is one divided by some number that’s a little scary”? How is this marketed to people? I can’t say how all places market it. I can just say what I would say, and what most of the people I do know say, is: If you’re going to get a PhD in history with the notion that this is going to assure you of a tenure-track job in a place where you want to live, that’s not going to happen, or it’s very unlikely that it will happen. Now, there are people who are getting PhDs in history who are finding other places that will employ their skills: working for foundations, working for local or the federal government, sometimes working for corporations which will want to have an in-house historian. There is some growth in fields beyond academia, what has come to be called public history, so it’s not entirely hopeless. What I say to you is, if your vision of your future is that you must be an academic and you want it to be in history, I would say that’s very, very unlikely it’s going to work out in current conditions. How will large language models change how we do historical research?…

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