Worst jobs in humanities? What are they exactly?

Hmm...I don't know about the current ones.

But I guess the good news is that not many of them made Worst Jobs in History. I think we could say that biology and chemistry are big here as well. Although by the Georgian period a couple turn up that might be relevant: Artist model and hermit?

Huh, maybe Medieval Wise Woman qualifies too?

Great question, Dave. I have a friend whose wife was an inner city social worker, so the "children's social worker" you offer does leap to mind. What made it bad was not only the issues of budgets and bureaucracy, but the scarring emotional experiences -- both the ones witnessed in doing the work, and the ones gained personally by doing it. It is certainly in the same category as a worst case hazardous situation (as with physically dangerous science jobs), although given the subtleties of the danger and the difficulty in measuring or even recognizing psychic and emotional damage, one might make a case for it being even worse.

(I take your question, though, not as a challenge to measure which is worse (to do some kind of ranking) but just to wonder what the bad humanities jobs are, so please don't take my example as a competitive entry.)

I wouldn't have thought of describing social work as "work in the humanities". Since "humanities" usually means things like "foreign languages" how about translating the text in porn magazines as a crap job for a humanities graduate?

how about translating the text in porn magazines as a crap job for a humanities graduate?

I think this is the most convincing example so far.

BRC: I've been asking a few of my humanities and social science type friends this question, and most can't come up with a truly bad job, only job's that, as they put, "sorta suck".

Usually, they're the jobs a graduate must work through before doing what they want to do for a living, or worse yet: teaching others to do what they want to do for a living.

I think scientists don't mind having terrible jobs that can burn, bite, scold, puncture, freeze, etc. because they love doing what they do, and they usually get to do it fairly soon after they finish up.

csrster: I don't think you're aware of who actually ends up doing social work. she was, for example, a philosophy graduate.

Dave S.: I don't agree that there's a difference between the scientist who likes doing dangerous work and the humanities graduate who likes doing morally and psychologically challenging work. they both do it out of a passion for the purpose. I have too many friends that (as Dave Munger noted at the terry blog) would agree that teaching freshman comp is the worst humanities job. "csrster's" example of the porn translator is fairly apt too. but the badness of a lot of the humanities jobs does have to deal with budget issues, with public respect (or lack thereof) and with the visibility (or lack thereof) of results. Consider the artist (or poet, or fiction writer) who brings a new creative arts curriculum to a school system, sees results, and then gets shut down. They have an awful, awful job -- no respect being the worst of it, I'd surmise. It doesn't surprise me that scientists don't mind their terrible (as in dangerous) jobs, since doing them fits into the stereotype of the bold, frontier-pushing, risk-taking pioneer. In that sense, and on that reasoning, those worst jobs aren't even bad. Now, dirty jobs...a whole other thread.

BRC: I agree, with you - jobs that suck the life out of you (i.e. soul crushing, character smashing, pride pounding jobs) are, without a doubt, the worst jobs in any field.

Regarding:
...the badness of a lot of the humanities jobs does have to deal with budget issues, with public respect (or lack thereof) and with the visibility (or lack thereof) of results.

I suppose this applies to any field, but a "Lack of respect" might be more prevalent for individuals in the arts and humanities (I don't think these individuals deserve any less respect, but simply have a history of getting the short end of the respect stick). You're right - the "worst jobs in the humanities" are far worse off than those in the sciences. After all, purchasing scientific protective equipment is a lot cheaper than paying for hours and hours of therapy later on.

I think the question is not answerable, because it isn't clear what is meant (besides the subjectivity of "worst jobs" -- is something that is really, really boring like copying articles "bad"?).

My first issue is "humaninities" -- I'm a sociologist myself an wouldn't consider my work as "Geisteswissenschaft" (~ humanities) but rather as "Sozialwissenschaft" (lit. social science) or maybe as "Kulturwissenschaft" (culture/cultural studies).

The second issue is the "in" -- the science examples suggest that it is a work done inside of the system of science, maybe including positions like lab assistent in an university laboratory or helping hand at some scientific excursion. But the social worker example suggests that "in" here means something like "jobs that one can do after one has studied humanities". Maybe the difference between both areas isn't as big in science (especially in applied science), but the worst jobs in university/academia are quite different from the worst jobs after university.

For "worst jobs in (extended) humanities in academia" I would say a badly paid, very time-consuming teaching position with no autonomy about what to teach, lots of grading to be done and no time for research could be a prime example, to answer the unanswerable question at last.

well, i would have to nominate "working for the military" in really any capacity whatsoever, as a former historian and philosopher of science. having studied symbolic logic for a time and then being immersed in the Land Where Reason Need Not Apply is not a soul-enriching experience.

Worst field-related jobs in the humanities, hm. TB gets close with "I would say a badly paid, very time-consuming teaching position with no autonomy about what to teach, lots of grading to be done and no time for research," although I'd modify that slightly to describe a job I used to have: "a badly-paid part-time, non-staff community college teaching position where you wind up with the courses no one else wants to teach, and only get paid for lecture time (ie. all your prepwork, office time, and grading is off the clock)." (You aren't expected to do research, because you aren't actually faculty.) When you work out hours worked versus rate of pay, you wind up making about $2.17/hr.

In my experience, the second-worst directly humanities-related job is a marketing or technical writing job where one's supervisor thinks that the "writer" part of your job title translates to "the secretarial pool," and makes you answer the phone, do the filing, clean the office, and make the coffee.

Also, at least around here, librarians have it pretty badly. The local library won't even consider you for a regular position until you've worked for them on a casual, on-call basis for at least a year. What that means in practice is that if you want to be a librarian here, you have to accept a job with no guaranteed hours albeit with an hour cap set at 21h per week, that also pretty much precludes you from having a regular second job to bring your pro-rated pay up to something resembling minimum wage. The work's not all that hard once you can get it, but the exploitation factor takes the fun out of it pretty quickly. (They're doing this to actual MLSs, by the way.)

Among the humanities grads I know, the worst non-field-related job you can have is working in a call centre. So it could be worse.