According to Louis Menand, "trying to reform the contemporary university is like trying to get on the Internet with a typewriter, or like riding a horse to the mall." In The Marketplace of Ideas: Reform and Resistance in the American University (Norton, 2010), Menand gathers four essays that deal with problems in general education, the transformation of the humanities, the resistance to interdisciplinarity, and academic conformity, and concludes with suggestions for reforming graduate education.
Considered together, the essays shed considerable light on the difficulty—or perhaps the near-impossibility—of changing existing institutions. As Menand knows, it's hard enough to reach a settlement about a general-education program or define what counts as English nowadays.
The central theme of his book is that the problems of the contemporary university have origins that go back to the late 19th century, to Harvard University in particular—a time and place on which the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Metaphysical Club is well prepared to comment.
I want to focus on Menand's concluding chapter, "Why Do Professors All Think Alike?" because it contains his proposals for reforming graduate education.
The title of that last chapter suggests yet another foray into the culture wars, and perhaps some direct engagement with David Horowitz, a persistent critic of the tendency of professors to skew left of center. But Menand, a professor of English and American literature at Harvard and a staff writer for The New Yorker, steers a moderate course. Like Stanley Fish, Menand agrees that preaching about, say, anarcho-syndicalism in your linguistics class is probably not something that should be covered by academic freedom, conventionally understood.
Menand references the 2007 study, "The Social and Political Views of American Professors," by Neil Gross and Solon Simmons, to show that, although there are relatively few conservatives in academe, professors gravitate toward moderate liberalism. It turns out there aren't all that many tenured radicals. The reasons that Menand offers for the prevalence of moderate liberals are familiar: "Professors are trained to question the status quo"; there is a relative lack of other havens for liberals; conservatives prefer higher-paying occupations; and the baby-boomer demographic continues to dominate in academe (younger faculty members are more moderate).
More provocatively, Menand asks "whether holding liberal views has become a tacit requirement for entry and promotion in the academic profession" in a period in which political commitment has replaced the ideal of disinterested objectivity. He asks whether there is a "code" in academe that extends to "matters of intellectual, pedagogical, and collegial decorum, [that] the entrants are required to demonstrate for admission to the profession ... including personal manner and appearance."
Menand's primary concern is not politics—he's not demanding equal time for conservatives—but rather a sense of boredom with the homogeneity of academe. Perhaps it's too easy to pick out academics at the airport on their way to the MLA convention. There are few surprises in seminar rooms and conferences; we are all humming and head-bobbing while the rest of the world ignores us. And, of course, academic freedom—the historic lynchpin of the whole enterprise—becomes almost meaningless in such a uniform context. "Liberalism needs conservatism, and orthodoxy needs heterodoxy," Menand writes, "if only in order to keep on its toes."
But Menand's ennui becomes most interesting for me when he turns his attention to circumstances faced by graduate students, specifically the time it takes to earn a doctorate and the difficulty they face in finding an academic position: "The higher the barriers to entry in an occupation, the more likely there are to be implicit codes that need to be mastered in addition to the explicit entrance requirements."
The length of graduate programs in the humanities has increased, Menand notes, because the dissertation has to be written as a first book instead of as an apprenticeship exercise. True or not, there is a perception that you need a book for an interview, and the recent collapse of an already bleak job market in the humanities only adds to it (even while publishers are cutting back on monographs). We all know this system is unsustainable, but we are trapped by the way things have been done before.
One reason graduate education needs to be changed is "simple humanitarianism," he writes. "Lives are warped because of the length and uncertainty of the doctoral education process," and "there is a huge social inefficiency in taking people of high intelligence and devoting resources to training them in programs half will never complete and for jobs that most will not get." The barriers to the profession have become so high that a student who is "unsure whether she wants a career as a professor is not going to risk investing eight or more years finding out," and the consequence is "a narrowing of the intellectual range and diversity of those entering the field."
Menand's solution is not to "make it harder to get into a Ph.D. program" or "harder to get through." Standing against the calls for reducing the number of doctoral programs, Menand takes the counterintuitive position that "there should be a lot more Ph.D.'s, and they should be much easier to get." Why? "The nonacademic world would be enriched if more people in it had exposure to academic modes of thought."
Moreover, he argues—and I agree with him, strongly—that the "academic world would be livelier if it conceived of its purpose as something larger and more various than professional reproduction—and also if it had to deal with students who were not so neurotically invested in the academic intellectual status quo."
He believes that we need to shorten doctoral programs because Ph.D.'s "are being seriously overtrained for the jobs that are available" (i.e., teaching positions at liberal-arts and community colleges). He rightly points out that the claim that a Ph.D. is needed to teach undergraduates is belied by the reality that graduate students often teach undergraduate courses from the year they arrive on the campus (apparently, not even a master's degree is needed). "If it were easier and cheaper to get in and out of the doctoral motel," he writes, "the disciplines would have a chance to get oxygenated."
There is in Menand an interesting spark of contempt for the academic enterprise: He thinks it absurd that it takes 10 years to become a certified member of the literature guild, when it only takes six years to become a medical doctor and slice off someone's appendix. He repeatedly observes that graduate school is a motel in which students "check in but do not check out."
In his discussion of the time it takes to get a degree, Menand gives inadequate attention to the financial pressures faced by most graduate students. For me, graduate school, even at Harvard, was a continual chase for money: teaching assistantships, research assistantships, selling used books, applying for prizes and grants. My progress slowed to a standstill for almost three years until I received a dissertation-completion fellowship and wrote most of the paper in one year (and it shows). The problem is money at least as much as it is the need to produce a monograph before hitting the job market.
Another problem is that most of the people with prominence and power are insulated from the pressures that affect most academic workers. Well-positioned and connected faculty members generally don't socialize with adjuncts, and, until recently, their graduate students dared not complain.
According to Menand, "the world of knowledge production is a marketplace, but it is a very special marketplace, with its own practices, its own values, and its own rules." Marketplace rhetoric covers up the role that conscious decisions make in the structuring of an academic labor system. Menand reaches too easily for the claim that there is "a serious imbalance between supply and demand," even as he puts forward a plan to create even more graduate students. Where will they work? How will they feel about having even fewer chances for the academic positions for which they've trained? How will they pay their student loans? Where are the nonacademic jobs to come from? Menand doesn't say.
The suffering of underemployed Ph.D.'s is great because their devotion is so remarkable in a culture defined by marketplace values. Far from being a cultivator of the humanities, the academic labor system has destroyed dreams and stamped out passions; it routinely drives gifted and idealistic people to the brink of despair and beyond it. It has done so for 40 years now, and there's no end in sight. The enemies of intellectualism—for whom the word "professor" cannot be uttered without a sneer—have no greater ally than the wasted lives of so many would-be academics.
Graduate schools ask students to behave like idealists, but the schools act like the corporations they train students to despise. That contradiction could only last so long before all the talk about "love," "calling," "the life of the mind," and "apprenticeship" became so obviously dishonest that such words can only provoke mockery and anger in our time.
Menand shows how academe became professionalized, but he is less successful at explaining how professors are becoming deprofessionalized. In a year when Money Magazine is telling undergraduates that professor is the third "best job in America," Menand is drawing attention to a problem, but his solutions are unconvincing, and I think he will find the debate he craves regarding his proposals for reforming graduate education.
Comments
1. judithryan43 - March 19, 2010 at 08:30 am
It seems to me that many of Menand's ideas are influenced by his experience at Harvard, which is unlike its peer universities in many respects. He and Alison Simmons (Philosophy) chaired the committee that introduced the new General Education program. I personally was a little disappointed that the program was not bolder. I'm not convinced, though, that the results would have been similar at other universities.
With regard to graduate education, there is a reason why Menand gives less space than you would to students' constant scramble for financing. Harvard now has more opportunities for graduate funding, through both term-time grants and dissertation-completion grants. Graduate students in some programs do still have a tough time finding enough teaching to support themselves, but most departments are now doing better in guaranteeing teaching opportunities, especially for graduate students in their third and fourth years. Once graduate students are no longer compelled to do excessive amounts of teaching just to get by financially, time to degree should be shorter. It will take a little while for that effect to kick in.
I do think Menand is right about the imbalance between supply and demand. Graduate students would "check out of the motel" sooner if there were more jobs available. We would need to make much more serious cultural changes, however, if we were to expect more graduate students to go into non-academic jobs after the Ph.D. My brother in Australia is supervising a doctoral candidate who is running his family's grocery store while writing a Ph.D. thesis for the sheer fun of it; but I cannot see mobs of students taking this attitude to graduate studies here.
2. quasihumanist - March 19, 2010 at 12:03 pm
Actual Europeans who know the situation better should feel free to correct me...
My impression is that, in Europe, a PhD is no longer thought of as training for academic employment. This seems to be because the academic job market there is even worse, because the general job market for young people is a lot worse, and because graduate school is cheaper. So their graduate programs get students who are very capable, not necessarily interested in an academic career, but in graduate school because their prospects for employment in the rest of the economy wouldn't be that good anyway.
3. lipark - March 19, 2010 at 06:20 pm
The university, as Benton suggests, has developed about as cutthroat a job market as one finds in 21st century capitalism. It's a winner take all model that allows people doing the very same job to be paid wildly different salaries, something no corporation would permit, if only for its detrimental effects on morale. So much for the academy as a bastion against the market.
On the other hand, while I see a lot of handwringing over the "poor unemployed humanists," I haven't actually found too many historians and English PhDs begging for spare change at the intersections. Let's not underrate the adaptability and initiative of those bright souls who put themselves through the rigors of advanced academic training. Universities could help by offering a wider range of job placement services (beyond academic jobs) for their graduate students. It's not that I think that there is an easy solution to the problem; it's that I think graduate students are more resourceful than they are getting credit for.
4. blowback - March 19, 2010 at 10:48 pm
Benton is correct to highlight the obvious flaw in Menand's hope that more Ph.D's would come to "enrich" the non-academic world when evidence suggests that in fact the non-academic world, at least in the U.S, often displays its poor understanding and contempt for those who have earned Ph.D's in general but most clearly towards those in the humanities. See comments 184 & 185 under Benton's previous essay above("Big Lie About Life of the Mind"). Let me point to some issues that these debates about reforming higher education and the Ph.D in the Humanities often leave out.
1. There will never be any reform unless we have a centralized and national educational system. Leaving higher education in the hands of individual institutions is no longer useful. How many years have we been presented with reforms of higher education, legal education, and medical education and yet no change has ever come! Change will never come from those in higher education who now have power and position. The change must be forced upon them from the outside. These institutions have proven time and time again that they cannot police themselves and in the absence of oversight they have abused the professionalism of countless adjuncts, failed to provide an honest look at their own academic failings, and continue to distort the truth for their own self-serving interests.
2. Though much discussion has been given over to reforming the Ph.D in the Humanities. I have yet to read any detailed suggestions beyond the vague ones repeated here. The larger issue is why do we still cling to individual departments as the best means to organize knowledge. Disciplines are often arbitrary and methods often cut across disciplines. Yet even if one could make the Ph.D more interdiciplinary would that address the absence of job opportunities? Building a better Ph.D still will not fully address the matter that needs thinking. However, one can add that what is needed is a more formal structure of moving Ph.D's from graduate school through full-time non-tenured positions to more traditional tenured ranks. What is needed are more full time positions not more tenured positions. In addition, the practice that no graduate who has earned his or her Ph.D in the humanities more than 3 years from the time of application can apply for post-doc fellowships and scholarships just adds another injustice to a long list of injustices.
3. This brings us to a issue that these debates fail to raise. Why do we have a society that has failed to create enough jobs for those who have in fact earned an education above and beyond what many have earned? We have a public discourse that seeks to use higher education as a substitue for a more pointed examination of American Capitalism. Why do we continue to accept the false view that suggests that if ever more and more students graduate from college that there will be more skilled positions waiting for them? Do we really think that each time a person graduates with a Ph.D or just with a college degree that there is a job that will be created for him or her? Time and time again in these debates there has been no attempt at providing a critique of what is the clear failure of market capitalism to provide the state of affairs it claims it and only it can create. What it has achieved is the utter waste of time and lives of those who have given time and effort to their education.
4. This crisis is not limited to graduate students in the humanities or even the sciences the same trend is found in law school and medical school which can longer be assumed to provide graduates with secure and well paying employment. We have built a winner take all society in which winning has come to be defined in terms and conditions that only the very few can ever hope to obtain. Hence higher education is no longer the means of one's escape from one's class or one's improvishment. It becomes part of the larger trap created by the contradictions of a society that refuses to admit to its contradictions and false hopes.
5. Having the correct critique of our conditions is not the same as being able to change our present plight. However, we should not assume that there are alternative careers waiting for Ph.D's in the Humanities or that the world will welcome them. Indeed, it would be hopeful if underemployed Ph.D's could be considered for non-teaching staff positions at universities but the failure and even the contempt that these institutions have for those who teach is repeated each time they refuse to even grant a Ph.D an interview for a position that they rather fill with a BA with no teaching background in Academic Support Services. I am not hopeful that any change is possible when one fully confronts what adjunct professors face as they attempt to apply and re-apply for academic and non-academic work, law schools, and graduate programs. In this society, more than any other society I can think of, the more educated you become the more hated you are and the more people are interested in seeing that you will never get a second chance. But America has always been a nasty place to live and learn and our educational system has always mirrored but has never placed into question the ideas and the foundations that keep this injustice in place year after year.
5. linomioni - March 20, 2010 at 09:16 am
I have been working as Lecturer and Instructor in US universities teaching Italian. It is sad to see part time instructor position or even worse, pools for temporary teaching where PhD are required... Having a PhD in Italian Literature does not mean that one is prepared to teach language.
6. john_drake - March 20, 2010 at 10:46 am
"Universities could help by offering a wider range of job placement services (beyond academic jobs) for their graduate students."
Interesting idea, lipark, but who will offer these services? At the university where I earned my doctorate, the professors had no idea how to get a job doing anything other than professing, and the people in the placement office worked there only because they were too incompetent to get a job doing anything else.
7. trendisnotdestiny - March 20, 2010 at 12:11 pm
This was an outstanding expression of the current issues and realities; acknowledging the ramifications of bottleneck processes of homogeneity of academe, gothcha capitalism that is undergraduate, and graduate school (debt for diploma without a longterm position), and the 40 year process of developing this market...
Once a market is initiated, the direction of the status quo is maintain it and protect the profits from it; Our role becomes an enforcer of the process in academe:
1) Open up (your mind and new markets)
2) Assess profits (find those market engines; exploit them)
3) De-regulate- change the rules or gut old rules to favor profits
4) Privatize - ownership connection b/n stakeholders/implementers
5) Cut Social Supports - foster dependence on the new system
6) Protect Profits - deny entry to new market participants
8. 11232247 - March 20, 2010 at 11:16 pm
.
9. villi - March 22, 2010 at 02:12 am
blowback: here is a specific proposal.
Have chairs at top departments (or elsewhere) lead the way by hiring people for tenure-track positions who do NOT have PhDs. Instead, require an MA in the area plus three publications in the top three journals in that field. If we stop giving preference to the PhD over the MA, then time to degree will drop.
Similarly in business: have businesses require two years of some set of college courses instead of a college degree and you'll cut costs there too.
Employers find degrees a convenient signaling mechanism, but maybe there are better and cheaper signals out there.
10. boiler - March 22, 2010 at 08:17 am
blowback makes an important point, though I don't agree with the solution. Our higher education system is currently very decentralized, with hundreds of doctoral institutions in fifty different states deciding for themselves how many students to educate and how to do it. This decentralization makes it impossible to have any meaningful solution for the problems that Benton is always wailing about. The only possible way to address the imbalance between the supply of PhD graduates and the thin demand for their services is to have a central authority with the power to limit access to doctoral study. The only entity that could conceivably exercise such power is the federal government.
Personally, I'm uncomfortable with the idea of such a central authority over higher education -- I think it opens a possibility for state control of academia that could be quite dangerous. Perhaps I'm wrong, though, and I'm willing to be convinced. I wish Benton and his amen corner would address this question head on, rather than simply complaining about the current system. If you're convinced that the current system is "a trap and a lie," are you willing to endorse the kind of centralization that could improve it? If so, then say how that would work, and explain to people like me why our fears are unfounded. If not, then what other solution (beyond exhortations to everyone to be good) are you proposing?
11. dwilliams5 - March 22, 2010 at 08:23 am
Villi,
That may have merit. Then the hiring institution awards the Ph.D. to those M.A./M.S. tenure-track faculty that prove themselves to be aligned with the values of their institution. Perhaps they get the doctorate at the tenure mark. This would be sortof like line-breeding using an agricultural metaphor.
12. villi - March 22, 2010 at 03:14 pm
boiler: The Fed is not the only way to coordinate. Each field has a professional association. E.g. psychology has the APA. This organization could (a) collect from programs and post accurate information about these programs and post supply-demand stats, and (b) could "accredit"/approve of some limited number of PhD programs given current academic job market demand (measured in tenure-track positions with decent salaries, not adjunct positions).
So, the question is: why aren't professional associations doing anything about any of this? Or are they?
dwilliams5: What you're suggesting could work, though I was suggesting getting rid of not giving the PhD any weight at all and using something else instead. Another option is to actually award a PhD on the basis of three publications and not on the basis of a dissertation. (This might have actually been standard practice outside the U.S.) At the end of the day, however, tenured faculty or deans or someone else in positions of power at have to want to make this happen.
13. runwithscissors - March 22, 2010 at 10:35 pm
Why not simply adopt the UK system of 3-4 year PhD that focuses upon a single research project. Under this model each PhD position is funded, either from grants or departmental soft money, and candidates compete for the places. By adopting this system, the time to completion goes down, the number of places goes down, and PhD students get to researching and dissertation writing much faster.
14. umgrad - March 24, 2010 at 11:15 am
This subject provokes some rather fanciful ideas, such as what follows. As the baby boom generation grew to college age, the demand for teachers grew, and new Ph.D.s got jobs-until around 1971. Then the market closed with a disheartening clang, and has largely remained so. This phenomenon also affected K-12 teacher opportunities, dramatically so in northern industrial states, who lost students due to the industrial collapse as well as the demographic shift. Since 1972 we have had a very demoralizing, dishearteningly difficult job market in academia. Since we can assume no NEW jobs on balance will be generated, especially in the liberal arts, the goal then is to replace the existing professors. In other words, only one graduate student will in theory replace the existing professor. Realizing that students change their minds, die, or have other random events occur that eliminate their taking over, a more realistic number is larger than one, perhaps even two. Besides the replacement, all the other students have no shot at a doctoral-level college teaching job. Rather, they are de facto studying to do OTHER things, although that realization is stark. These "other" things may be teaching at lower levels (best job prospects are inner-city and rural low-performing public schools but only if these students have teacher certification), private-sector positions (most which, despite annoying claims of love for lib arts folks, don't hire nontechnical types; just walk into a corporate office and inform them that you are ready to work for them with your doctorate in U.S. History) or procuring higher degrees to inflate your salary at your existing job (which is most likely public school teaching). Assuming that most doctoral students are smart, and therefore aware of this, one conclusion we can reach is that doctoral study in the liberal arts may, or perhaps already has, become the province of the rich, for whom employment is not necessary and the luxury of study for its own sake exists. In a way, this takes us back to ancient times.
15. paultuttle - March 26, 2010 at 10:03 am
Or it's the province of those with financially supportive spouses, which was overwhelmingly the case in both of my own graduate programs.
16. lazarec - March 31, 2010 at 04:50 am
Derrida and Foucault both taught in French high schools for years before they moved up to higher education.
Why not have American academics do the same?
The benefit would be twofold:
First, only those who enjoy and are good at teaching would end up at universities.
Second, the quality of high school education would be vastly improved by an influx of PhD students.