This week The Chronicle published a short piece promoting a book that will shortly be published by the Princeton University Press with the sexy title, Educating Scholars: Doctoral Education in the Humanities.
The book is based on the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation’s decade-long Graduate Education Initiative, which invested $85-million in 54 humanities departments at 10 universities “to improve the structure, organization, and financial support of their Ph.D. programs.” The key reason for this massive Mellon investment in graduate education in the humanities at a handful of leading universities was the (correct) perception that graduate students in the humanities were taking much longer than their peers in other fields to complete doctoral programs. The mantra of this Mellon program was the need to reduce “time to degree,” and the principal mechanism for speeding up time to degree was the provision of more ample financial aid on a time-limited basis – usually four years of guaranteed, fairly ample funding.
The expectation was that if students were assured of support “grave to cradle,” they would give birth to their dissertations more predictably and quickly. Across the country, even in schools that did not receive Mellon largesse, humanities departments have therefore been struggling to provide such graduate financial-aid packages in order to be competitive, with the result that fewer students are admitted on financial aid, but those who were admitted receive both more substantial and longer-term funding.
The Ehrenberg, Zuckerman piece in The Chronicle summarizes their analysis of the data collected by the Mellon Foundation over the long course of this project — only one of the impressive data sets produced by the Foundation under the leadership of Bill Bowen. They find that both time to degree (shortened) and attrition rates (lowered) were ameliorated by the enhanced financial support provided to the departments in the study. They also find that clearer statements of departmental expectations and advisers’ advocacy of “timely completion” of dissertations were helpful measures. But they admit that “we found no single answer to the question of how long it ‘should’ take to earn a Ph.D. in the humanities if the faculty’s main concern is students’ successful [post-doctoral job] placement.” They have some sound advice for departments, but in the end they seem mostly to advocate better data and more transparency. This will clearly be a book of interest to any thoughtful graduate dean.
But the Mellon project doesn’t address the problem that interests me, which is how long it takes to write a truly fine humanities dissertation. I certainly understand that people who write dissertations want jobs, and that there may be some relationship between time to degree and job-worthiness. But I am idealistic (naïve?) enough to care more about the quality of the dissertation than how long it takes to complete it. Some of the best dissertations I have directed have taken a very long time to complete, but they have not only contributed more substantially to knowledge in the humanities than quickie dissertation, they have also provided the basis for successful academic careers. I think it would be better to worry about the end product than the process, and I don’t know any serious humanities scholar who is surprised that it frequently takes a long time to write a dissertation in the humanities.
What’s the big deal about “time to degree”? How about “time to greatness”?
(Brainstorm illustration incorporating photos by Flickr users casey.marshall and dbdbrobot)
5 Responses to Time to Greatness
judithryan43 - October 16, 2009 at 8:00 am
What a wonderful essay! It takes a long time for thoughts to mature in the humanities, partly because it’s almost impossible to carve out an area that isn’t connected in often quite unpredictable ways with neighboring areas. In addition, the more widely and deeply one has read, the more readily one can give shape and nuance to one’s argument. It’s now quite common for a doctoral candidate to drop an entire chapter from the dissertation because a job opportunity heaves into sight. Another frequent result of the “time to degree” rush can be that certain parts of the dissertation are more polished than others. Then, of course, the book that everyone hopes to produce from their dissertation will take so much longer to be ready.To be sure, we should guard against the teaching overloads that often delay doctoral candidates. They need to acquire teaching experience, but not an excessive amount of it. They shouldn’t be twiddling their thiumbs or dragging their feet either. But the dissertation does need to be developed to the point where its argument seems to “click.”As for “time to greatness,” I’m still working on it, long after my Ph.D. degree.
11159995 - October 16, 2009 at 11:44 am
One point that complicates this issue is the fact that libraries have access to all dissertations electronically through licenses from ProQuest and thus consider these dissertations–as they never did in the old days of UMI’s microfilm versions–to be part of their permanent collections. Consequently, many libraries these days will not buy books based on dissertations. Junior faculty who are on the tenure track are now often expected to publish two books within their first six years on the job. If they can’t use their dissertations as the basis for one of those books, they will have an even harder time fulfilling that expectation. Accordingly, but quite rationally now, these junior faculty would be well advised to plan in advance to omit things from their dissertations that could be added later to transform their dissertations into books and persuade librarians that they have sufficient “value added” to be worth purchasing. This advice would seem to run counter to what Stan is suggesting, viz., that dissertation writers take all the time they need to produce works substantially contributing to knowledge–and affirm, contrary to what Judith Ryan presumes, the wisdom of dropping an entire chapter. — Sandy Thatcher, Penn State University Press
luther_blissett - October 16, 2009 at 12:37 pm
As the above comments make clear, we cannot change the way we think about time-to-completion for graduate students without changing the way we think about expectations for tenure.Two years into work on my dissertation, I made the decision to pursue high school teaching rather than a position as a professor. I still wanted the doctoral degree for personal satisfaction and for the expertise it would require of me. However, it allowed me to write a dissertation that was more about the state of the field in my area of interest, allowing me to explore broad issues in the primary and secondary literature without heavy demands for originality.I think that is what a humanities dissertation should be: a focused survey of primary and secondary literature on a particular topic. It should be the bedrock not only for some original publication but also for the scholar’s teaching, which will demand expertise not only in narrow topics of interest but also large-scale surveys and seminars that should help students find their own specialized topics. There was a time when an annotated bibliography could work as a dissertation, and I think that should still be the case. It would also be helpful to other scholars and teachers (both secondary and college-level) if more dissertations provided clear surveys of a field rather than merely local insights. Thinking of literature, it’s becoming clearer and clearer than any historical approach to the novel, for example, must consider the vast terrain of the popular fiction published in a particular period. If more doctoral students took on that task, writing surveys of a wide body of literature rather than the book-like thesis and four novel dissertations, that body of research could aid future research in a powerful way, giving more scholars access to literature that is too often ignored.
minnesotan - October 16, 2009 at 1:59 pm
Better yet, we could stop giving out PhDs until the students have reached the output level expected of assistant professors. That way we can up the ante on those associates who want tenure. Say nothing of full professor status!I wonder how much the Mellon foundation will have to throw at universities to get them to support their PhD candidates for five or six years after passing their exams (and how much this will further divide the haves from the have-nots).
judithryan43 - October 20, 2009 at 5:47 am
Sandy Thatcher’s point is a good one. I stand corrected, at least on that topic. It just seems unfortunate to me that the dissertation is increasingly becoming a very preliminary document.Sorry for the delay in my response. I’m overseas, using somewhat unreliable internet connections.