Faculty job drought makes the NY Times

"Doctoral Candidates Anticipate Hard Times", in today's New York Times.

... A survey by the American Historical Association, for example, found that the number of history departments recruiting new professors this year is down 15 percent, while the American Mathematical Association’s largest list of job postings has dropped more than 25 percent from last year.

“This is a year of no jobs,” said Catherine Stimpson, the dean of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences at New York University. Ph.D.s are stacked up, she said, “like planes hovering over La Guardia.”

See also this this caustic reaction, which estimates that tenure-track jobs are down only 25%, and argues that the real problem is that universities use "substitute student workers" instead of faculty.

Fixing this lousy arrangement could provide millions of jobs. Graduate students shouldn’t be teaching their asses off, and undergraduates should be working a lot less too. Many forms of this “work as financial aid” or extreme work-study are essentially using up and spitting out young people as disposable labor--costing them their chance at degrees, not enabling them.