Our professional literature and conferences have been consumed with conversations about “alt-ac” career pathways for over a decade. This term for employment outside of tenure track positions is really not an alternative at all—it is the only way for most newly trained historians to support themselves. Our understandings then of labor and compensation in the historical profession must look both within and beyond the university.

Within the university, several trends challenge traditional understandings of labor and compensation. Rampant adjunctification has left an increasing number of PhD-trained historians outside of tenure track employment and therefore vulnerable to the many challenges of precarious, undercompensated labor. Adjunctification has also weakened the ability of faculty to organize and resist administrative management strategies that further hollow out the professoriate and demean the work of historians. Neoliberal logics continues to transform higher education. State governments have steadily defunded public higher education, particularly afflicting history departments and others outside of industry-facing STEM fields. Universities then are increasingly dependent upon grant-winning and fundraising activities, prioritizing fields of inquiry tied to the defense department and giving new power to well-funded interest groups to sway research, teaching, and public programming.

Entrenched inequalities that plague all aspects of our world also haunt our profession. Scholars of color, particularly BIPOC scholars remain under-represented in our faculties, and thereby face the burden of serving as a lifeline to vulnerable student populations. Women faculty members face ongoing forms of harassment, abuse, and disproportionate service burdens.

Seismic changes are remaking the worlds of publishing and challenging the existing sources of compensation garnered by many historians. The open access movement has unquestionably expanded access to academic knowledge. However, the ideology of the open access, without wider changes in the political economy of higher education threatens to merely replace old inequalities with new ones.

Our challenges are many. The goal of this roundtable is to both diagnose the daunting problems facing labor and compensation in the historical profession as well as to propose practical solutions, or at least ameliorations from the perspective of tenured faculty members, graduate student scholars, and historians working outside of higher education.