ReallyOldSchool

This should give would-be humanities doctoral students pause:

The bias against stale labor

warblersrule

This is actually a pretty common practice and has been for some time. If you've been on the job market for two or three years without a book published or at least contracted, you're usually considered stale goods.

This predictably results in a mad dash for adjunct or visiting professorship positions, where you publish like mad before your 1 or 2 year appointment is up. Those who succeed may get a TT job. Those who don't...well, you don't see anything from them anymore. Some people manage to get a TT job after hopping from one temporary position to another. Getting a job after being out of academia for a few years, though? Pretty slim chances.

I'm not sure this should caution students against going to graduate school at all, even in the humanities. Rather, I think it simply serves to emphasize the importance of (1) going to the best possible program you can and (2) having a fallback plan in case you don't get a job in academia. Success rates in academia, especially in the humanities, really aren't very evenly distributed; some programs do far better than others. For example, you may have places like Yale and Chicago placing 100% of their graduates in medieval English in TT positions, USC and UGA placing 40%, and Western Rural Regional State U only 10% (to make up random numbers).

juillet

The only thing that makes this different is that they are explicit about the requirement. A lot of search committees do this tacitly - without advertising it. Generally speaking in academia (even the job-sparse humanities), if you adjunct for more than about 3 years, your chances of getting a tenure-track job go down by a lot. Number one, you probably aren't publishing the way you need to if you are cobbling together enough classes to live on while adjunct teaching. Number 2, adjuncts aren't really integrated into the department the way tenure-track or even non-tt full time professors are. And number 3, you've proven that you are willing to teach all the crappy classes no one else wants to teach for low pay and no benefits…so why would anyone want to give you decent pay and benefits when you'll do the same thing for less?

Humanities folks - and really, any students interested in a PhD - should already be considering the prospect with caution. Academia is a hard market even in the sciences, especially the life sciences.