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[daniel_von_flanagan]

Sure, but what blue collar family is proud of their daughter for achieving any degree in the humanities, much less advanced degrees?

In my experience, such families have more respect for this achievement than we seem to have ourselves.

Try the 40-pp bibliography of long and dense works you have to read and absorb for your dissertation.  Add to that traveling to 2 or 3 libraries (less necessary than it used to be), which can be done only at times when you have no obligations at your doctoral institution (coursework or teaching or being an r.a.), and a lot can be explained.

Sorry, but this is little different from most degrees in STEM and Social Science, at least in non-lab disciplines.  To read a dense article in quantum mechanics is not so very much easier than reading a dense article in literature, except to the extent that the ways that the latter can be badly written are probably more irritating than the ways that the former are badly written.

recent college grads who see being a TA as a viable alternative to being a barrista and living in their parents' basements.  They rarely anticipate that they may work for barrista-level wages after they get their degrees and have foregone all those years of earnings.

They didn't get nothing for those years of earnings; they acquired (in addition to knowledge) an opportunity to get an academic job.  This certainly has value.  Moreover, the barista-level job they take after the PhD is likely to have more opportunity for advancement than being an actual barista, in which case the value of this potential outweighs the opportunity cost of having not gone to work at Starbies straight out of high school or college.

quasihumanist: there has been some extension of degree time in STEM fields, but only up to around 7 years, not 10+.  The idea that the average non-lab scientist or (especially) mathematician can waltz into a highly-paid postdoc after grad school is rather amusing; while there are many more "holding cell" postdocs now than there were 25 years ago, for all but the best students the career path is still roughly the same as for humanities grads, with the exception that applied scientists often have an industrial fallback. - DvF

[quasihumanist]

Quasihumanist is right to put the decline of academia in a more general context, as does Marc Bousquet.  Over the past 40 years, the vast majority of jobs in the US have been sped up, dumbed down, suffered under increasing expectations and made to take longer, all for flatlining wages.  Sure, there is a minority that has benefited outrageously, but the average citizen has suffered tremendously.  Now, the crisis in the infrastructure of our society has begun: people saddled with debts they can never hope to repay have begun to default.  Just like the crisis in jobs, the debt crisis hit the working class first and has begun to creep up the social scale.  All those loans people took out in lieu of better wages and benefits so that the elites could transfer unheard-of profits up the social scale are collapsing.  Unfortunately, the elites have taken production offshore, so that Chinese workers will soon be able to consume their goods for profit, replacing the debt-ridden, American consumer.  The hollowing out of academe was only one part of the great wealth transfer, made possible by delusions about hard work and more education in a "new economy" where all Americans would be elite, white-collar workers and third-world laborers would do the grunt work.  Though tenured and tenure-track scholars bear a great deal of blame for failing to sound the alarm, barely anyone has done anything about the corporatist seizure of our society.  Don't expect much from new grad students either, barring some general revolt in society.  I have met some, and suspect that there are many other, recent college grads who see being a TA as a viable alternative to being a barrista and living in their parents' basements.  They rarely anticipate that they may work for barrista-level wages after they get their degrees and have foregone all those years of earnings.

At the same time, the Chinese have benefited enormously from having manufacturing happening in their country.

I'm not going to buy some argument that we are more worthy of these benefits than they are.

My view is that the world simply doesn't have enough natural resources for everyone to be as rich as Americans, even when the physical and knowledge-based infrastructures everywhere else are more developed.  This means we'll all have to get used to being poorer.  Not Africa poor, but maybe France poor or Portugal poor.  (US per capita GDP is about $45K, France about $32K, Portugal $22K.)

[aandsdean]

Daniel, I'm talking 40pp worth of BOOKS.  Thousands upon thousands of pages written by people like Joyce, Frederic Jameson, Derrida, Kant, Bourdieu and a whole bunch of other people whose prose is, shall we say, not an easy read.

In my dissertation are over 300 books from the 17th century, all of which I read, face to face, in original editions in rare book libraries (Huntington, Beinecke, Clark, UVa, Iowa, Folger, etc.).  It took time to get to these places and do this reading.

BTW, it took me 8 years and 2 months to finish, including 3 years and 2 months of FT teaching.  But I read fast, and had the huge advantage of having my parents' house within a short drive of the Clark and Huntington so I didn't have to work extra hours to pay to study there.

[dolljepopp]

Yep. I am not in English or history, but in a humanities field and my dissertation bibliography will have somewhat over 200 books on it -- many in a language other than English, which I read and speak and can translate, but at a much slower speed. (And a few of those are old enough to be printed in a script that is no longer used.)

Plus articles and some other things I won't get into, as it would out my field.

I am on pace to finish in nine years and one-to-three months.




I expect to have my loans paid off about six months after my death -- provided I am an actuarial miracle...

[locutus]

This may be a little off topic, as I really don't know much about humanities research but..

Why so many books? Are all of them actually that crucial to the dissertation? Have the length and scope of humanities dissertations changed over time? I've read a few and while the topics were interesting, the dissertation as a document seemed, excessive. I know that the scope of what is expected for a dissertation has been a minor issue in my field. How does that play out in the humanities?

[daniel_von_flanagan]

Daniel, I'm talking 40pp worth of BOOKS.  Thousands upon thousands of pages written by people like Joyce, Frederic Jameson, Derrida, Kant, Bourdieu and a whole bunch of other people whose prose is, shall we say, not an easy read.

I've only read a little Derrida, but I've read a fair amount of Kant and Joyce, and would not allocate more time to Ulysses or even Critique than to 30 pages by Niels Bohr to achieve the same level of useful comprehension. - DvF

[i_heart_bulldogs]

Arguments about whose research is harder are like watching an academic version of a pi**ing contest.

[kedves]

Arguments about whose research is harder are like watching an academic version of a pi**ing contest.

I think they are peaceful and interesting, much like the sea ice reports.  No one has yet mentioned my least favorite qualifying-exam Long Difficult Book, though.

[lolar2]

And what is that?

[kedves]

And what is that?

Ah, that would be Georg Simmel's The Philosophy of Money.

[dolljepopp]

I can't speak for anyone else, but I didn't see this as a pissing contest. A question was asked about why the time for Humanities' dissertations and a couple of people familiar with writing one answered based on their experiences.


As for why so many books, well, again, everyone's diss is their own. Mine has evolved into a far more theoretical one than I originally intended, so I have to cover the theory that's out there, plus anything else that intersects with it if it even tangentially touches on my main theme.

In brief, I am arguing that the historical interpretation of Widgetology as a parallel movement to Frisbeeotics is an overly simplistic view which too easily dismisses the contributions of the ur-Widgetologists, who are too often more or less dismissed as wide-eyed and amusing but largely irrelevant cranks. Though they were certainly wide-eyed and amusing cranks, the irrelevant label is patently unfair. I contend that it is a misreading of the "urs" and that Frisbeeotics is itself too discrete a discipline to infer such a parallel. I argue that there is a direct line from the ur-Widgetologists to the so-called "New Widgetologists" and that the work of both should really be read together -- rather than oppositionally -- as a sort of neo-meta-Widgetology, which both re-inforces and contradicts classic Frisbeeotics -- just as the ur-Widgetologists intended all along.

This, I contend, is a new way to look at the field and it has profound implications across all widget related fields. Since Widgetology is a small sub-field, and ur-Widgetology an even smaller sub-sub-field, my diss requires explaining the history, historiography, and current trends in both -- PLUS the history, historiography, and current trends in all those fields that intersect with wider Widget Studies (Frisbeeotics of course, but Wankerism and Blurfnics, I'm looking at you as well). A few books in each direction, with an article or two thrown in and before you know it, you have stacks and stacks of turgid prose tomes in the bib of what you desperately hope will be your own seven-copy selling volume.

And thus we have the Humanities dissertation...      

[janewales]

This may be a little off topic, as I really don't know much about humanities research but..

Why so many books? Are all of them actually that crucial to the dissertation? Have the length and scope of humanities dissertations changed over time? I've read a few and while the topics were interesting, the dissertation as a document seemed, excessive. I know that the scope of what is expected for a dissertation has been a minor issue in my field. How does that play out in the humanities?

That's a good question, locutus. It doesn't seem to me that expectations for what one must read to write a humanities dissertation are all that different now than they were some years ago. The pressure to publish is ratcheting up the expectation that a dissertation should be rapidly book-able, so I suppose there might be an element of perfectionism at play now. But I keep coming back to the incredibly rapid UK-based English doctoral degree-- a former student of mine just finished at Cambridge, and it took about 4 years, and that was pretty standard (ever notice how young UK academics are? and it's not just that I'm getting old and grizzled...). It's often said that UK PhDs have some trouble navigating the North American job market, but I've always understood that to refer to an absence of the sorts of professionalization and pedagogy programs which have become increasingly common on this side of the pond-- not to any lack in the dissertation itself. So I remain puzzled about the wildly variable completion rates within the same discipline-- it must have something to do with addressable systems questions (like funding, time spent teaching, and so on).

[i_heart_bulldogs]

I can't speak for anyone else, but I didn't see this as a pissing contest. A question was asked about why the time for Humanities' dissertations and a couple of people familiar with writing one answered based on their experiences.

Maybe my years of living in a grad student dorm soured me on such discussions, so I leap to conclusions. No offense intended y'all.

I do remember putting my diss next to my human geography friend's diss (book)... like 1/10th of the size, mine was.

[aandsdean]

This may be a little off topic, as I really don't know much about humanities research but..

Why so many books? Are all of them actually that crucial to the dissertation? Have the length and scope of humanities dissertations changed over time? I've read a few and while the topics were interesting, the dissertation as a document seemed, excessive. I know that the scope of what is expected for a dissertation has been a minor issue in my field. How does that play out in the humanities?

That's a good question, locutus. It doesn't seem to me that expectations for what one must read to write a humanities dissertation are all that different now than they were some years ago. The pressure to publish is ratcheting up the expectation that a dissertation should be rapidly book-able, so I suppose there might be an element of perfectionism at play now. But I keep coming back to the incredibly rapid UK-based English doctoral degree-- a former student of mine just finished at Cambridge, and it took about 4 years, and that was pretty standard (ever notice how young UK academics are? and it's not just that I'm getting old and grizzled...). It's often said that UK PhDs have some trouble navigating the North American job market, but I've always understood that to refer to an absence of the sorts of professionalization and pedagogy programs which have become increasingly common on this side of the pond-- not to any lack in the dissertation itself. So I remain puzzled about the wildly variable completion rates within the same discipline-- it must have something to do with addressable systems questions (like funding, time spent teaching, and so on).

It certainly does have to do with things like funding and teaching.  As I understand it (and please, note this careful qualifier), the time science grad students spend in the lab generally contributes directly to their own research.  In other words, there's a kind of seamless quality to the work of a science Ph.D. candidate that there often or usually isn't for a humanities Ph.D. candidate.

As for length and scope of humanities dissertations, a worthwhile exercise is to go to the local R1 library and audit how long they are in the pre- and post-wordprocessing eras.  When I was writing mine, I did some spot checking and found that the difference was in the neighborhood of 100 pages.

Mine isn't all that long--it's around 300 pp. all up (I can't find my bound copy so I don't know exactly).  It also physically takes a long time to write, edit, and proof something that long.  

My roommate from Jr. year in college earned his Ph.D. in genetics at Yale.  He certainly worked extremely hard, and I have no qualms whatever about the incredible rigor of his program.  However, it took him four years, and his diss was like 50pp. long.  Big difference in that area.  I get the impression that science doctoral programs are more compressed and intense than humanities programs.  There's a lot of sitting around reading in humanities Ph.D. programs.  

It's quite leisurely in a certain kind of way, but there are simply physical time constraints--how fast you can read, how easily your primary materials are available where you are, how good ILL is at your library, how fast your committee reads drafts and gets back to you (this is actually a huge obstacle, as many of you know), and other factors, all of which slow down completion of the degree.

I could have EASILY finished my Ph.D. in four years, including coursework, if I'd had 100% funding and didn't have to spend so much time grading those damned freshman essays.  But there you go.

[lightningstrike]

The Thomas H. Benton articles should not come as a revelation to anyone, especially to the disillusioned scholars who communicate with Benton.  The Big Lie has been going on for decades.  The admonitions about grad school in the Humanities are out there, and they have been out there since the "Golden Age" of of the profession. It's impossible to cover up the Big Lie, unless one refuses to see the obvious or one has no other choice but to believe.   I don't buy the notion that no one ever told these people about the lack of real job opportunities in the field.