next »

[systeme_d]

http://harvardmagazine.com/2009/11/professionalization-in-academy

This article by Louis Menand is not from the Chronicle, but it is a very interesting broad-stroke overview of the production of humanities PhDs, and the role of the academy in American life.  He is addressing many of the issues that I struggle with (particularly the role I play in replicating students/future professors within my own discipline).

I also quite agree with his remark that the current doctoral system produces academicians with greater loyalties to our disciplines than to our universities.  (Unabashedly guilty as charged here, and I think there is good reason for such a dynamic.)

Any thoughts?

[keineidee]

Thanks for posting this, system_d.

At the core of this argument seems to be a vision of graduate students buying into a narrow view of the academic world and their futures within it, and self-fashioning to conform within conventional departmental boundaries. This may be unique to my institution, but most humanities graduate students I know are in reality deeply interdisciplinary (perhaps iconoclastic?) in their interests (perhaps even too much so), in their objects of study, and their methods. However, they are also conscious that they need to "pass" as professionalized specialists in A (and B and C) within X field on the market, and they understand the value of deep engagement with a particular focus, at least as a means towards that end. This double consciousness may contribute to some of the time-to-degree issues that Menard mentions, but acknowledging these wider-ranging interests as part of what they bring to the table perhaps also helps open up the possibility that graduate study in the humanities might do more than simply reproduce the System as it now stands.

I am a Ph.D. in English who for a number of years chose to do staff work in other areas within academia. I am now a regular-rank (though not tenure-track) faculty member in a different departmental area. While some of my grad school advisers might not consider me a blazing success (job <> tenure-track in English), my English Ph.D. training has helped me every step of the way, not only b/c I have the credentials, but also because I have the "research," "critical thinking," and "communication" skills Menard's essay trivializes.

Perhaps if I had left academia entirely these skills would be less transferable, but frankly I doubt it. Deep and sustained engagement with critical, historical, textual, and cultural questions tends to leave its mark on how you do your work in the world, even if the specific subject matter changes.

[pournelle]

Thanks so much for posting this article; the best thing of the many pieces I've read bemoaning the state of the humanities. His proposal to make it much easier to get a phd--and thus to radically increase the number of phd holders--is as counterintuitive as it is deeply persuasive once I had a chance to really think about it in the context he suggests.

[systeme_d]

Thanks for your post, Keinedee.

I think you point to something of a sea change in English, if not for the rest of the humanities.  New PhDs in English tend to be quite interdisciplinary, at least from what I see at my place.

Although my own discipline has been, since its inception, explicitly interdisciplinary in nature, I think you're right that younger scholars see the traditional disciplines as boundaries to be pushed.  And they're doing it.

I'm not sure I agree with the proposal to which Pournelle points, however.

[mountainguy]

This is an interesting essay, but I see Menand's argument as contradictory. Why should the system change if powerful vested interests that favor the current structure have no incentive to do so? I would further add that Menand seems to favor trading social darwinism of the intelligencia (that is, only those individuals who are bright enough to navigate disciplinary structures survive) for social darwinism of the free market (only those who know how to "sell" their product to the public culture survive). Call me an cultural elitist or nonpragmatic, but I'm much more comfortable taking my chances on the former than I am on the latter.

Beyond that initial contradiction, I take issue with several of the trends that the essay observes. What about fields that are placing graduates in non-academic positions or in teaching in "applied" programs? I'm in an eclectic department that bridges the humanities and the social sciences, and I'd say that of the social scientists, fully 1/3rd work outside of academia after finishing their degrees and another  1/3rd work teaching practical "skills" classes. Similarly, I'm not so sure that law school or med school serv as useful analogies. The American Medical Association very carefully regulates the number of seats available in U.S. medical schools to keep supply and demand in balance and hence there isn't an over-supply of doctors in the United States. On the other hand, the ABA does not as carefully limit the number of law school seats, and thee is a glut of unemployed lawyers in the United States at the present.

Anyway, I feel like I'm starting to ramble. I guess my basic reaction here is that I'd prefer to go with the devil I know than the devil I don't. But if I want to be postmodern about it for a minute, I'm a product of the system, so of course I think that.

[sibyl]

Thanks, systeme_d. 

Menand says many things that I've said, so naturally I agree with him.  In particular, the system is poor at producing PhDs because it's found much better incentives to produce ABDs.

I don't agree with Menand that the risks of pursuing a PhD are well known to students -- at least not if my own advisees are any indication -- but his larger point about self-selection probably has merit.

And I also don't think that when Menand speaks of narrow interests he's talking about narrow scholarly interests, but rather about the narrowness of the academic enterprise.  The fact that many PhDs are more inter- and multi-disciplinary than they used to be doesn't change the fact that doctoral education is designed to fit students only for academia, and any graduate who doesn't get a tenure track job is regarded as a "failure."

I think Menand's point about the need to produce more PhDs is one way to decouple the degree from a single kind of job (professor), especially a job with dicey prospects.  We can all think of JDs or MBAs who work outside the law or business; people think, yeah, it could be handy to have a JD working in insurance claims or an MBA in public policy.  If there were so many PhDs that it seemed natural to have one if you work in a law firm or a public library, then perhaps graduate education wouldn't have the problems it has now.  And perhaps the transferable skills would get greater emphasis.  This is why I don't think, as keinedee does, that Menand was trivializing the transferability of the PhD skills; I think he is rather saying that they are clearly ancillary to the subject-matter mastery that lies at the heart of graduate education today, and that defending the PhD as currently constituted as a transferable-skills degree is disingenuous.