A recent article in the Chronicle of Higher Education focused on the tough academic job market quoted Dr. James Vander Putten, assistant professor of Educational Leadership in the UALR College of Education.

The article, “For New Ph.D.’s Who Must Lower Their Sights, Some Lessons From an Earlier Generation,” spoke directly to Vander Putten’s research. Here is an excerpt from reporter Audrey Williams June’s article:

When the academic job market is particularly tough, graduates from doctoral programs at the nation’s most-prestigious universities often find themselves weighing job offers, if they can get them at all, from teaching-intensive master’s-level colleges. Having been trained to work at institutions like the research-oriented ones from which they graduated, those newly-minted professors sometimes find themselves out of their element on their new, often rural, campuses.

Researchers studied a small group of professors who earned their Ph.D.’s in the humanities in the 1970s and settled for such positions, when the job market was much as it is now, tight enough to push some graduates from top-tier colleges into tenure-track positions at less-prestigious institutions that couldn’t wait to hire them. Their study, in which professors reflected on how they managed to remain enthusiastic about their work after careers of two decades or more at master’s-level institutions, is scheduled to be presented on Saturday at the annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association.

’’These are people who were trained at elite research universities and ended up at third-tier, rural, teaching institutions,” says Jim Vander Putten, an associate professor of higher education at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock and a co-author of the paper, “Senior Humanities Faculty at Comprehensive Institutions: Maintaining Vitality Over the Career Span.” “They really had to make some transitions.”

Read the full article on the Chronicle’s website.