And there are only 40% who can count themselves as holding tenured jobs that allow them to regard their income prospects with any security.

"Looking back, it was absurd because I had a tenured job," he said in a recent interview.

And universities seemed even less willing to fill slots with senior scholars; the number of listings for tenured jobs fell to 16 from 54.

It had not escaped my notice that just after she decided to leave the Latin professor Milton announced that he was giving up his tenured job.

"Looking back, it was absurd because I had a tenured job," he says.

In the top 50 computer science departments, there are no black, Hispanic or American Indian women in tenured jobs, or even on the tenure track.

But it also creates an ever-greater oversupply of Ph.D.'s competing for ever-fewer tenured jobs.

He will leave behind his tenured job and the unfinished cat experiments, which were financed by a $1.7 million grant from the National Institutes of Health.

I've had this tenured job here at the Institute for Advanced Study, and I couldn't have asked for anything more.

A doctorate is a union card to get a tenured job.